


Fear and Loathing in Gastown

by Tyellas



Series: History is hard to know [9]
Category: Mad Max (2015 Video Game), Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, Attempt at Humor, Backstory, Cannibalism at its finest, Character Death, Complete, Economics, Ethical Dilemmas, Farce, Furiosa driving large vehicles, Gastown is full of terrible people, Gen, Gun Violence, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Mad Max vehicle porn, Max Rockatansky is missed, POV First Person, Recreational Drug Use, Sex workers, Slavery, car with aircraft engine, other characters listed as they appear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-06-28
Packaged: 2018-06-04 10:37:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 25,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6654655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All a reporter of history wants is a break from the end of the world. His plan is simple. Skive off from the Citadel, get lost at the Gastown Races, and toast the memory of Miss Giddy. Instead, he gets a savage journey to the heart of the Wasteland’s dream. Buckle up for Gastown at its greasiest, Wasteland economics, Furiosa driving large vehicles. And one old survivor trying to put things right when post-apocalyptic absurdity collides with the History Woman’s legacy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Escape

_Wordburger:_ _But our trip was different. It was a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character._

* * *

 We were somewhere around Gastown on the edge of the Wasteland when it really began to kick in.

The sense of being free, for the first time in thousands of days. In oldyears.

It would probably be the last time I’d feel this way before I died. I was determined to make the most of it.

Today was, gloriously, my fault. Four of us were careening around the desert in the Citadel’s junkiest, least-likely-to-be-missed car. Two War Boys, one of the Citadel’s fighting feral recruits, and me: the History Man. I’d wound up elevated at one of the largest remaining bastions of humanity, the Citadel. After a dutiful year assisting the Sisters and the new Council, I’d persuaded the drivers, prevaricated a reason for a fuelled vehicle, and recruited myself a bodyguard. And we'd taken off, to relax, as it were, in the heart of the Wasteland sun. Not only were we free of the Citadel. This was the first day since the world fell when I'd had no responsibilities at all. No running a settlement or keeping a tribe alive or watching anyone else’s back.

Being on the apocalypse’s roads again had me reeling. I felt falsely young. All of seventy again, instead of seventy-six, back when I had some space left among the wordburger tattoos that crowded my skin. Maybe even sixty, when I’d kept my rifle ready as my tribe fled a road war. When the blokes in the front shared a joke, forty-six flashed before my eyes. That had been my first year in the madness of the emerging Wasteland: more often than not, laughter was the only way to get through. The wordburgers on my hide drew the Wasteland sun into their dark ink, to burn with life and memory.

Much as I was enjoying the drive, it was coming up on noon. We had a long list of off-duty misbehaviour to get through. I shouted to our driver. “Let’s stop here!”

My bodyguard protested. “We can’t stop here! This is Buzzard country!”

Bogan, our driver, grumbled, “What he said. He’s a Wastelander, he knows.”

Young Treads, promoted to lancer for the day, said, “If the History Man wants to stop, I say we stop! He’s got the knowing like Corpus, but from the Hot Zones and the Before-time and…where was it you were when the world fell? Arcadia?”

“ _Wordburger: academia_ ,” I said. The world’s downwards slide had taken me along. I started as a somebody, Alan Matheison, geology professor and consulting hydrologist. I became a survivor, one of the lucky founders of a long-standing settlement. When that luck ran out, I was nobody, one of the wretched  scraps blown around the wasteland the world had become. Now I was somebody again. For what it was worth.

“I only want a moment,” I said. “Good spot for some prospecting.”

“What’s prospecting?” asked my bodyguard.

I wished Max Rockatansky was with us. For all that he came and went from the Citadel, he knew both the Wasteland and Gastown. But with Max missing in the Wasteland, months late on a scouting trip, we were all having to make do. I’d recruited a different feral fighter to watch my back. “Prospecting is reviewing rocks to see if there’s any minerals we can use. If I see anything shiny, any evidence of your name, Oxidative Damage, we’re in luck. Once I’m done, we’ll have to check what we find with the traders in Gastown. I hear there’s a race on tonight…maybe we can catch it.” Bogan grinned, knowingly, and took our junker offroad. I added, “Keep the engine running. I won’t be long.”

Oxidative Damage got out first. There was a lot of him to move: he was two meters tall, heavy with muscle. When he gave the all clear, I eased myself down. Anybody seeing the pair of us would have been rendered powerless. Powerless with laughter. The contrast between my age-shrunken frame and Oxy’s might was the Wasteland’s idea of humor. If it kept me alive, so much the better. My vanity was as extinct as the blue whale, the cane toad, and the name of the arid land around us. _Wordburger: Australia_.

There had been three generations since our fast decline and our global fall, the oil wars and water wars and the desperate madness of nuclear war. Humanity’s apotheosis had, it was said, killed the world. But it certainly made it easier for my geologic pretentions. There was nothing, any more, between me and the stones.

I picked up a loose rock. “Standard Precambrian formations. Same as the Citadel.” For a smattering of protection, I’d thrown on one of my oldest possessions, a faded island shirt. I tucked the red sandstone chunk into my shirt pocket and brushed off my hands. “All set here. _Wordburger: good enough for government work!_ Now, what happens next is very important. It’s a Before-Time geologists’ tradition: finding a pub.”

Oxidative Damage spluttered, “You’re supposed to be working for the Imperator! Like us road warriors!”

“Oxy, let me introduce you to a new wordburger: _skiving_.”

Bogan chuckled. “Too right, mate. Ain’t had a good night on the Gastown asphalt since I used to drive Corpus over. He’d let us get away with murder as long as we had a good yarn about it.”

Young Treads had chrome in his eyes. “Gastown Races tonight! V8s on fire! Gonna be historic!”

I felt a chill. I’d engineered this escape because I needed a break from my life being history. I wanted a wander around a place that resembled the world that died, and a drinking session in a quiet bar. I planned to shout ‘shine and protein for some beggar to listen to my stories and raise a glass with me when I was ready for a toast.

Oxy’s jaw twitched. “Gastown’s bloody septic…always dealt better in Bartertown…” This flicker of his old self was rare. He shook his head and stared up at the sun directly, to burn it away. “I guess we wouldn’t be going if the Great Goanna Spirit didn’t want us to.” Oxidative Damage was some of the fighting flotsam of the Wasteland, recruited for the Citadel’s depleted defense ranks. Left for dead after a desert skirmish, he had survived when chance brought him a goanna. Lizard flesh had given him the strength to stagger away, abandoning everything but his old name and his fierce new belief in a Great Goanna Spirit. In devotion, he transformed himself into a lizard, filing his teeth to points, covering himself in scale tattoos, bifurcating his tongue. I’d helped sharpen his tattoos: he’d vowed by the sun to help me someday. Today was that day.

“I appreciate it, Oxy. It’s good to honor a debt with a deal,” I said. I lumped back in the car, quickly for the man I was now. Access to the Citadel's relative luxury had, ironically, spurred one of my body's slumps into aging. I'd felt one at forty-five, when I'd needed to start using a rifle scope and I started looking like my father. Another at sixty, that felt like I'd turned into an old man overnight. This one was going to take me down from a tough old boot to a dodderer. If it wasn't the start of the very final decline.

“Which way now?” Bogan asked.

“I think you know….”

Bogan and Treads chorused, “Today we’re going to Gastown!” We raised a cloud of dust as Bogan raced us off.

_Wordburger: Where must we go? We who wander this Wasteland in search of our better selves?_

This throwaway of mine, meant to illustrate the waste of Gastown violence and vengeance to Toast the Knowing, had struck her deeply. It was now whitewashed on the wall of the Vault along with the History Woman’s statements and Angharad’s protests. Every time I looked at it, I felt an impostor. Wasteland Yoda.

People liked the question better than the answer. They'd love for the answer to be a stone cairn under a blue moon: show up and there's your better self, conveniently in the form of your one true soulmate. It's a lot harder than that. You look at yourself. You confront and admit the terrible things you’ve done to survive the Wasteland. And you forgive. Then, you keep moving. Living.

If your better self was another person, other people, you could lose them.

Like I did.

I was alive forty-six oldyears into the end of the world because I hadn’t been alone. There had been other former somebodies with me, three of us on the apocalypse’s roads, settling down into a little tribe of History People. We covered ourselves with tattoos, becoming walking encyclopedias, in case bad luck tore away the few pages we held onto. Also, it looked fierce. We needed all the help we could get.

The Citadel hadn’t been good to our tribe. Immortan Joe killed the first of us with his general, impersonal cruelty to the Wretched. Refused the Citadel’s medical care, our cancer-stricken History Tohunga chose euthanasia. That left two of us. We looked like a matched pair, History Man and History Woman, but we weren’t. The death of the open-hearted artist who’d brought us together - her best mate, my actual mate - nearly tore us apart. But after a wracked, argumentative day, we decided we were still family: still tribe. And we survived.

Immortan Joe killed the second of us in stages, with deliberate, personal attention. He snatched the History Woman from the Wretched as a sanity-saving teacher for his Wives.

The History Woman’s own journal chronicled her strange years there. Trapped, witnessing torment that was supposed to be privilege, she had been her best self – but then, she usually was. A font of knowledge, gentle yet steely, wise yet accessible, subtle, a healer. Her journal had left off at a point of hope: with the Wives and their guard, Imperator Furiosa, escaping to seek a Green Place. Leaving the Immortan dead and his armada ravaged, they returned to take the Citadel, to find the History Woman had vanished. When they tried to find news of her, they uncovered me, still Wretched. That’s how I wound up in the Citadel.

Amongst the Wretched, I had embodied my best self, too. Setting aside my apocalyptic sins, teaching and helping and using every gram of my wits, living a life of the mind because that was what I had. Once I’d been elevated, and the Citadel’s new hierarchy settled in…not so much.

I’d been useful to the Sisters as an old man with some knowing, tolerable for my link to their lost mentor. I negotiated with old cranks, like the crew who ran Gastown, and kept an eye on the Immortan’s still-essential son, Corpus Collossus. But, _wordburger: he who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself._ I caught myself hoarding books, being a pedant, lecturing above the Citadel children’s level, enjoying the politicking too much. My success meant I witnessed an interrogation where we found out what happened to the History Woman.

She had been dragged along on the Wives’ pursuit in the Immortan’s Gigahorse. Questioned, she had refused to betray the young women. So, the Immortan set his ham-handed son and sadistic medical man to torture her. Their final act had been to leave her in the midday desert beside the corpse of one of the Wives, drenched in fresh blood to draw the crows. The History Woman’s sacrifice preserved Furiosa and the Wives, and led to the New Citadel.

My friend’s crow-picked bones remained scattered in the eastern dunes.

To hear about it had been to lose her all over again, knowing how I had failed her. This was why I wanted a drink. A lot of drinks. The toast I was planning would be to the History Woman, as I remembered her – as Sophia Giddy. Once I'd done that, I felt I'd be able to keep moving, as it were. Until it was time for me to stop.

Oxidative Damage spoke up. “Serves us right. Buzzards.”

“Fang it, Bogan!” Treads yelped.

Bogan hit the accelerator. “Fangs ain’t too sharp in this rustbucket.”

The first Buzzard vehicle screamed past. Its two companions slowed to tag-team us. Treads tried shooting the rifle, and failed. “Sharpen ‘em, Bogan, this piece of junk is jammed! Oxy, a thunderstick!”

I rolled my eyes. War Boys were awful with guns. So was most of the Wasteland. Ammunition quality was all over the place, these days. “Give it to me!”

“Keep it safe,” said Treads, passing it back.

I didn’t listen. This was a good old twelve-bore, memory in my hands. Did the bolt need to be clicked right a touch before its full turn left? It did. When I had it clear, I took a bead on one spiked vehicle. The Buzzards inside wriggled like maggots. But one of their tires was a whitewall, black and white as the magpies I’d shot, boy and man, until any wildlife at all became a treasure.

Taking out the whitewall tire sent them spinning out, just as Treads’ thunderstick sent the Buzzards on our right skewing backwards. The thunderstick hadn’t even exploded – it was a dud – its long handle had gotten laced into their undercarriage. The Buzzards’ lead car screamed back around. But it passed us to circle its lame companions. They were, for once, more important than our metal and meat. A change that might circle back to the peace emanating from the changed Citadel? Or another sign that the Wasteland was running down?

 We plunged into the canyon that led to Gastown. Now that we were safe, Bogan yelled at me, “Why didn’t you kill them?”

“We’re alive and your rifle’s working. What more do you want?” I snapped.

“A real lancer next time, that’s what! Mediocre, Treads!”

“What about no unnecessary killing, like the Sisters say?” The mild debate carried us through the canyon and over a rise, for Gastown to assault our senses. As soon as the refinery's great tangle of metal and flame came into sight, its incredible stink hit us, too. Bogan pulled a ventilator mask over his face. Oxidative Damage coughed. “Doesn’t it bother you?” he asked me.

I shrugged. “Maybe the Wretched dust in my lungs filters it.”

It was a lovely day, for Gastown. The refinery towers were emitting white steam. The toxic moat around the place shimmered iridescent blue. Our War Boys were nonplussed to be stopped and grilled at the Gastown bridge. “Never had this on the Rig runs,” Bogan blustered.

The Gastown enforcers kept their flamethrowers on us. “Not looking too official today, Citadel.” Bogan shrank. He and Treads had both gone light on the war paint, minimal white streaks and darkened eyes. Gastown’s lovers for hire charged those in full war white extra. A flamethrower stared me in the eye. “What are you here for?”

I leaned out my window. “Mischief. I’m here to get drunk. Oxy’s heading down to Fume Alley. These fine upstanding lads will be even more upstanding at your brothels. I hear there’s something happening in town tonight. Nobody at the Citadel’s sure what…” The enforcers laughed. Bogan was humming. Treads cringed in his seat. Oxidative Damage focused on the sun. “We’ve got trade goods. Perhaps you’ll want to check their quality.” I slipped each of the enforcers a water bottle.

The barrier was slid away for us. “Welcome to Gastown.”

Treads moaned, "Did you have to say all that?"

"What? It's not true? Besides, we're in now."

Gastown, industrial wonder of the postapocalyptic world! Population, some four thousand, some indentured to the refinery or Gastown’s Executive Board, others hangers-on and squatters, all with a Gastown citizen’s brand, or a decent counterfeit. Male to female/chosen gender ratio: a shocking 7 to 1, with social dynamics accordingly vexed for violence. Anyone without the citizen’s brand, anyone alone, was a mark, bait in waiting.

This was why, when we swapped clean water for parking, Bogan and Treads went off together, and Oxy stayed with me. Treads and I each hauled a satchel of Citadel water bottles to trade along the way. We arranged to meet up at sundown to check in. I wasn't sure if I was up for the race or not. For now, I had an idea where I wanted to start an unofficial Gastown day.

Gastown’s paths were mostly narrow laneways, two or three meters wide, punched through the refinery’s intricate pipeworks. The pipes gurgled and hissed, full of refining petroleum and its byproducts. Gastown’s main madness was perpetual denial about its own fragility and limits. Health and safety was as dead as heterosexuality. Their rulers sealed the place off with the toxic moat and flamethrowers, ran drill rigs downtown, allowed shanties next to fuel tanks. Eventually the place was going to go down to a pandemic or an invasion. Or it would simply explode when some irreplaceable piece of equipment wore out. Until then, every oldyear, they opened the gates to all the Wasteland for the Amnesty: a trading and migration frenzy capped off by an all-comers Thunderdome bloodbath. Last time I'd been here, with a Citadel delegation, it had been the Amnesty, and the place was a mob scene. I was curious to see the workaday Gastown.

The packed-in population meant there were always people about – and what people! Unlike at the Citadel, there’d never been a hierarchy favouring the healthy. This was understandable. Living in a post-nuclear-war oil refinery, belching unscrubbed emissions and surrounded by a toxic moat, brought out the variety in the human genome. We walked past people with achondroplasia, albinism, acromegaly, bone disorders, extra digits and limbs, goiters, lipomas, Marfan’s syndrome, crocodile-hide melanoma, port-wine birthmarks, scoliosis, and vitiglio. That was what I could see – they also favored masks and extreme body modification. Everyone had a mate or associate or guard to keep them safe, and the sharpest wits in the Wasteland.

On this low-toxicity afternoon, many of them went arm in arm. The historically brief concept known as sexual orientation melted down in the Fall. This smoothed the way for Gastown’s famous homosocial pairings, better known as Gastown mates. Every pair was different, spanning the libidinal continuum. Without that scant hope of human fulfilment, a chosen connection, Gastown would be even crazier. 

After the Citadel’s change of management (and a few Gastown assassination attempts) the new Citadel and a not-very-changed Gastown had worked out a _détente_. Gastown’s reshuffled rulers had made a few concessions to the Citadel’s new ethics. They let go of Citadel mother’s milk as a commodity. They grudgingly refrained from exterminating the wildcat diesel pumpers on the Wasteland’s fringes. And they assured the Citadel they were working on getting rid of slavery. Though this was, they claimed, complicated. Other trade agreements were impacted. Perhaps we could discuss it again at the next Amnesty. Or the Amnesty after that.

Quietly, Imperator Furiosa had asked Corpus and I to see if the wildcatters’ fuel could substitute for Gastown’s guzzoline and lubricants. After a day working with samples, he and I had come to an unusual accord. The wildcatters’ fuel was smeg. Rough, irregular stuff, passable for the Wasteland’s desperate vehicles, but we didn’t want it anywhere near the Citadel’s irreplaceable generators and technology.

If the Citadel wanted to pump up pure aquifer water, we were stuck with Gastown.

The most respectable market laneway was open. Vendors had just started selling fried crickets and honest-to-God miso soup. The History Woman would have been revelling in the variety around us, the salvage and the people, vying to win our eternal Wasteland game. I gave it a try myself. After a minute, I’d sighted: a tribe group, BDSM daywear, an improbable musician, edible insects, tumors… _wordburger: bingo!_ Even in the heart of Gastown, I had yet to beat Sophia’s record. The day we’d pulled up to the Citadel, Sophia had won Wasteland Bingo in an amazing thirty seconds. Us three History People had a good laugh over it. It had been our last one.

As we walked, Oxidative Damage gasped, “That poor child.”

A child, suffering enough to stand out in Gastown? “Where?”

Oxy pointed at a market stand. The feature item was a young goanna in a cage, tawny and golden, clinging sadly to the wire. I rolled my eyes and followed him over.

I wouldn't have minded freeing a lizard. The question of whether a lizard was a person piqued my interest. Unfortunately, my presence sent this lizard's price sky high: the vendor recognized me as a member of the Citadel council. Oxy’s rant about the Great Goanna Spirit hardened the lizard's owner against bargaining. After five minutes, negotiations going nowhere, I shut it down. “Sorry, Oxy. The four of us together didn’t bring enough. If we walk away, he might come down on the price.”

He didn’t, but as we went, a distinctive smell cut through the sulfur. Memories warred inside me: the classic Aussie sausage sizzle - versus the first time I’d smelled fat on charcoal and known how far humanity had fallen. I looked around.

Fragrant smoke billowed from a double-sized stand with a menu posted on a board. All euphemisms. Bear’s paws, pig’s feet, lucky oysters, shank, rib, rump…they called the fare everything but what it was: human flesh. The vendor, seeing me reading, lifted the lid on a hooded barbecue. “Today’s grill went down three days ago in the Murderdome finals!”

The smell was sinfully good. Somebody was done to a turn. _Wordburger: the only bedrock rule is don’t burn the locals._ I said, “Must have been quite the fighter, to make the finals. Wouldn’t that make him tough?”

“He was tough. Very tough. The toughest! Pure, angry protein! But he’s been hung a day, then brined. Now he’s in the last hour of an all-day slow cook.” The vendor’s short beard spread in a grin. “He’s half sold already but I can still set you up.”

On the one hand: the horror.

On the other hand: the ingenuity! In this Wasteland, with only metal and minerals and antagonists to hand, humans made life and art and nourishment out of what was available. Including other humans. And tonight’s menu had gone into the Murderdome of his own free will. _Wordburger: a modest proposal…_

Oxidative Damage saw me linger and asked, “You’re not going to, are you? You haven’t? The Great Goanna Spirit sent us her lizards to spare us from sin!”

I demurred, “The Citadel found me among their Wretched. You know what that means.”

Oxy’s sharpened teeth showed in a grimace. “You were one of the good Wretched, not a cannibal! You had to be. Citadel let you up.” 

“ _Wordburger: the deserving poor!_ Wretched days aside, I’m alive. I’m alive after the Fall. We ran out of rules and law about fifteen oldyears in. I spent your entire lifetime navigating the Wasteland.” I looked up, saw the man appalled. Softly, I said, “Don’t ask questions you don’t want answered.”

Oxy stood stunned for a moment, then huffed, “I must consult the Great Goanna Spirit!” With that, he stomped off to stare at the lizard again, leaving me unguarded. I let him go.

When I’d irritated Max with my end-of-the-world ethics, last time in Gastown, he had stayed with me anyway. I couldn’t really compare them. To deal with the Wasteland’s hardness and despair, Oxy had cast his mind and history aside. Max hung onto his own too tightly for his own good, was too sane for sanity in our absurd world. He would have known enough to not ask anything. He hardly ever did. Even when he should have. Another absence that, thanks to an idealistic moment of mine back in the Citadel - telling Imperator Furiosa she'd had the right idea seeking a Green Place, that the Citadel couldn't last, that sooner or later, they'd need somewhere to go and another way to be - was also my fault. I decided that before I hit the ‘shine, I would ask around, see if anyone had run across a particular road warrior in their own wanderings -

“You. History Man.”

I'd been recognized a second time. Before I could turn, a pale arm snaked around my neck and yanked me aside. “You’re coming with me!”

I turned in his grip, recoiling from a man's greasy touch. His hands and bare chest were stained black, the rest of his hide unnaturally pale, despite hints of dark hair. Not a full albino, but leucistic. Above a young man’s whippet waist, he had strong shoulders hoisting a treasure of a generator, attached to a crackling cattle prod. There was something else about him, too. The cattle prod rattled in his unsteady hand, his blue eyes were bloodshot with cunning. _Wordburger: Know your dope fiend! Your life may depend on it!_ An addict at his sober nadir. If I was the price of his next fix, I was in trouble.

“Oxy!” I roared. To buy time, I asked the cattle prod’s owner, “Who the bloody hell are you?”

“That doesn't matter. I make sure that whatever the Outcrier wants, the Outcrier gets. You’ve got the knowing. He wants to talk to you.” The man who’d set his name aside for his master’s sneered, “He’ll make it worth your while. “

Now I was curious. I’d heard street murmurs about the Outcrier: a Gastown _eminence grise,_ lying low during the Amensty, waiting for his own hour. Much of Gastown preferred the wild fights and races he ran to the official Thunderdome. Besides...worth my while? All the Wasteland’s barter and salvage flowed here.

At last, Oxidative Damage barged between us. The Goanna Spirit’s avatar must have flicked her tail in my favor. “Leave him alone, riff-raff! Don’t you know who he is?”

I raised one hand. “Peace, Oxy. He’s made me an offer. If you back me up here, maybe we can barter you that lizard when we’re done.” The parallel to Sophia’s snatching by the Immortan’s men wasn’t lost on me – except I had more defence than she had at that hapless moment. Was I putting myself beside her, reliving history, by going along? It seemed fitting. 

The stained man grinned, electric with his own success. I groused, “I can’t believe I’m still sober for this.”

He eyed us both with loathing. “You can’t believe _you’re_ sober? Come on! Let’s get this over with.”

Force, bribery, drug withdrawal, self-interest… Gastown business as usual. Nobody paid us the least attention as we progressed through the reeking, pipe-lined laneways.


	2. The Outcrier

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Outcrier’s warehouse is where the party begins. The powerful showman asks the History Man to confirm the provenance of a prize for the upcoming Gastown Race - and History finds he isn't the only one in Gastown who remembers Miss Giddy.  
> 

_Wordburger: No sympathy for the devil, keep that in mind._

* * *

 On the way to the Outcrier, I wondered who to be.

When there were three of us History People, newly outcast into the post-apocalyptic wastes, it could change every day. If we met Amazonian bikers, Sophia was our imperious mistress, and Travis and I waited for her orders. At the next camp, it would be Travis’ turn, Sophia and I hanging back while he joshed about putting us whitefellas in our place. Two days after, it was on me to snap _oi, back off, you blokes, hands off my woman and my darky_. Once in a while, it was hello, our names are Sophia Giddy, Travis Te Hauranga, and Alan Matheison, we all worked at the university together, it’s so good to be among _civilized people_ again.

That last introduction was no guarantee against us uncovering horrors and madness.

It was easier when everyone dropped the civilized veneer. Even us: when we turned it inside-out to wear civilization on our skins as thousands upon thousands of words. Sophia started it. Once the greiving frenzy that led her to cover her left arm and much of her face with words signifying memories died down, she went slowly, in mirror writing, everything neatly grouped. I followed: my attempts to be organised about it were undone when I kept remembering things to add. Travis, who went last, as usual, came out the best, as usual, his chosen history swirling around him in his heritage patterns, a magnificent body-covering _kirituhi_. The chief of the Mongrels among the former Wretched still wore Travis’ hide over one shoulder.  

Now I was in Gastown – civilized and insane to its oily core – being hauled off to do something for one of its top dogs: the Outcrier.

We had come to the sporting northern edge of Gastown. The refinery’s old physical fitness areas and vehicle depot had a new purpose. The old netball court was now permanently bloodstained, a court of justice for duels to the death. Nearby, a drained swimming pool was similarly stained. Stands and savage metal fenced it in as the Murderdome. Our electrically-equipped escort turned us towards a warehouse hung with more attractive pieces of metal than usual, salvaged neon, and a rough white-lettered sign. I read:

GAASTOWN REYSES SAAN UP HEER

“Why am I here?” I groaned. “Why am I even alive?”

Our escort revved his generator, making his cattle prod crackle, “You’re here and alive because the Outcrier wants you to say if something is trash or treasure.”

“Is that all? _Wordburger: Antiques Roadshow._ With me as the main antique. All right. Oxy, let me do the talking, thanks.” Agnostic as I was, I preferred the Great Goanna Spirit in comparison to the Immortan or some other Wasteland cults. But I didn’t think she’d do us much good, here.

The warehouse’s lower doors remained closed. The space before it was being used by a dance troupe, wearing tarnished metal masks, practicing aerials and hand acrobatics. This was good. Art was usually a sign of social health. And it was pleasant to see healthy young people who weren’t killing other people or submissive commodities. They watched us, let us through. About half of them swirled and spun easily up nearby pipes and stairs to the warehouse’s metal mezzanine. I hissed, “Oxy. The dancers – keep an eye on them. Dancers are strong…” The mezzanine was our destination, too. We went the slow way, up rickety metal stairs.

Everyone there was young, no-one beyond their mid-thirties. Apocalypse kids, born after the Fall. This was something that had been missing from my encounters with Gastown’s new government: serious succession, their next generation. Then I registered this group’s bulk or slyness, the tension, that none of them were clearly presenting as female. This could get ugly, quickly. Instinct told me to do this business and get out. 

Our escort’s greasy, blackened hand on my shoulder paused me. “We’re waiting. He’s the man in demand!” I was shoved towards the back of a line, others waiting while the Outcrier lectured some crew. Oxy pulled his lips back to hiss, baring his sharpened teeth as he stood by me. The generator man stood his ground. This was his territory.

I heard him before I saw him. Gastown’s air had roughened the Outcrier’s deep, projecting voice. “Any of you see Crow Dazzle, in the crowd, with a team, bring it back to me. What he’s doing, who he’s doing. For the show perimeter…” I had to lean around the two ahead of me, someone official-looking and a road-warrior type, to glimpse the man in demand.

Compared to the grimy thugs taking his orders, the Outcrier was a superior article. Tall, his whitefella’s skin nearly unscarred, shoulders broadened with a fur vest, upper face and skull obscured by a goggled, strapped mask, he was heedlessly free of a respirator. Anywhere else, with his stature and thugs, he’d be a local warlord. But Gastown was overpopulated with the strong and violent. He’d sidestepped that competition – and avoided its mortality rate – as an entertainer. The Murderdome was his show, and the Gastown Race tonight its culmination.

That settled how to present myself. _Wordburger: A man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident._

The road warrior turned back with a shrug. He rumbled to us through his face scarf, “Joe-damn race signup. All this to drive on a track.”

I smiled. “Nice hat you’ve got there.” It was. I hadn’t seen an Akubra that good in years. The felt crown was uncracked, its brim only notched once. There were a few crow feathers in the band, more woven into the dark hair falling down his back. A tattoo cabled down each bare arm, the beginning and end of a serpent.

He touched the brim. “Thanks. Got lucky. Usually do,” he said. “You the History Man?” When I assented, he said, “Call me Cutsnake.”

That was a warning, a surprisingly historic one. “Name like that, you’re a man with a memory, yourself,” I said.

Cutsnake turned to face me. He wore an open vest. In the center of his chest, the serpent tattoo was cloven in half, black blood dripping to shape a skull over his heart. “Joe-damn right. Someone did me wrong, once. Now, nobody dares. They know what I am.”

“Mad as a cut snake,” I said. He smiled mirthlessly. Another road warrior grappling with humanity’s cruelty, like Max, like Oxy. Unlike them, this one had taken the easiest route, joining what seemed unbeatable.

Motion caught Cutsnake’s eye and he turned, all fighting instinct. The Gastown official was ignoring us to do something unusual. He was peeling off his respirator mask. The savagely spiked leather stripped away to reveal startling youth and beauty. He ran a careless hand through his blonde hair, ignoring us to turn kohl-darkened eyes on the Outcrier.

One of the dancers nearby had gasped to watch this, and began to step forwards, struck by him. Other dancers elbowed each other. I was disturbed myself. That was a face in a thousand, and I’d seen it before. Where?

Cutsnake turned to the smitten dancer. He sneered, “Eyes off that one. Know where he’s been? He was the People Eater’s. Every way possible.” He curled his lip. “Wonder what’ll get him first - the clap or the Rot?” With a fastidious shudder, the dancer whirled back to their group - leaving me parallel to Cutsnake when the young official turned to see who was talking him down. He glared at us, then turned back, all haughty silence.

The Outcrier smacked his hands together and barked, “Now get out there and lock my course down!” Security detail dismissed, he surveyed us. “Silence, Cutsnake, Citadel...hmmm. Send the pretty boy through first. He’s easy. The rest of you, make yourselves comfortable. Help yourselves to the table. ‘Cept for you, ‘Lectricity. Be a good boy, now.”

Our escort, named at last, inhaled with frustration to be denied that table. It held a pharmaceutical potlach: red and black pellets, chemical-bearing paper, ampoules and spray canisters containing nitrous, nitrates, chrome, and fume, evil old bottles, a pint of raw ether, and twists of plant material stuck together with black gum.   _Wordburger: Once you get locked into a serious drug connection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can._  

It was the young official who was summoned. He reached into his gray and leather jacket, drawing out a bundle of five cigars. Nicotine – the one drug not on the table!

The Outcrier snatched them avidly and ran them under his nose. “Aaaah, from Peeps’ old stash. None finer. Tell the Jade I said thanks.” The Jade, the current peak of Gastown’s established power structure. That placed the young officer. He’d been the People Eater’s, yes – as a tongue-cut slave. Hence, his name. Now, he was one of the Jade’s people. Today, that sly seducer had sent him and the nicotine as minor tribute, addictive taunt, _bait_ to keep the Outcrier engaged. She, too, saw Gastown’s next generation here.

The Outcrier had the wit to pause before lighting one up. “Your boss lady poison these, Si?”   

Silence shook his head. He pointed at the Outcrier, then held up his hand and rubbed his fingers together, in a sign for money or barter.

The Outcrier laughed. “Not when they can profit from me? Nice to know! Tell the Jade the race is on: lineup changes to the last minute. I’ll put up with a Gastown auditor watching my crew. But make ‘em a looker. Bad for business otherwise. There’ll be Buzzards at the Gastown gate, two or three vehicles: racer and support. They want the prize as some sacrifice. Had ‘em swear to get in and get out, made them pay double.  I guarantee Gastown gets its cut of that. The Jade’s on the list for box tickets and the afterparty, too.”

The Outcrier disappeared four cigars into his fur vest, glanced back to our cluster at the top of his stairs. “Stick around if you want to see something amusing.”

‘Lectricity had been watching this exchange, fuming. The invitation made him snap. He stormed up, swinging the cattle prod to spark near the young official, accidentally-on-purpose. “I found the History and he’s ready to deal.”

“Good boy. Get over here,” he growled. Whipping out a cord, the Outcrier plugged himself into the other man’s generator. A palpable jolt passed between them. The Outcrier _lit up_ , with both actual lights sprinkled through his fur vest and a wide smile, reveling in the jealousy and attention. The dancers sighed dreamily, entwined hands or limbs with their mates or trios. Silence abdicated behind the lower half of his mask. (In half an hour, the Jade would know I was here...)

Cutsnake himself couldn’t restrain a nod of approval at their show of Gastown mateship. He stepped forwards, eyes glittering with hunger. “You got yours, Outcrier – I want mine. And I want the word on it.”

“Still got a race to win, Cutsnake.” The Outcrier indicated a slate on the wall, covered with a smear of race diagrams and creatively literate scrawls. “You ain’t alone.”

“I’m a top dog and you know it. That’s why you brought me him,” Cutsnake said, gesturing at me.

The Outcrier lit his cigar off of ‘Lectricity’s blazing cattle prod. “Didn’t do it for you, snakey-boy. I’m curious myself.” He drew on the cigar, savoured, and exhaled. “You. The History Man.”

I was on. “ _Wordburger: at your service and,_ “ I gestured at the people around us, “Your family’s.”

He liked that. “I thought the other guy was you, at first.” He gestured with the cigar at Oxidative Damage. “How’s a little old guy like you get the stones to try Gastown?”

Ask a geologist! “What I don’t know about stones isn’t worth knowing.”  

He bestowed a half-grin. “That ink go all over?”

“Oh, yes.  Don’t worry, you’re not missing much. My bum is covered with politicians…”

From behind, Cutsnake sneered, “What’s on your schlanger?”

I allowed him one look. “I’d tell you. But it’s a long story.”

“Bet your mum knows that story, Cutsnake,” the Outcrier laughed. The dancers made noises of amusement, too. “Enough with the Gastown burns. Let’s deal, here.”

The Outcrier turned the glow of his charisma on me. “You and me, we’re alike. I’ve got the wordburgers, too. We’re both culturated. They say if there’s knowing, you’ve got it. I believe it. It’s because you’ve got the know you knew to show tonight. For my Gastown Race! The racers today, they’re the winners from an Amensty’s round of Murderdomes. They need to know I’ll treat them right. I’ve got something here for the winner of tonight’s race. I know it’s good. I need to know if it’s the best,” he said, gesturing with a curled fist.

He opened his hard hand to beseech. “Can you help? Tell me if it’s what it should be? A moment of your time, I’ll set you up. The full value of a race entry, that’s some decent barter. Or some fine company for you and your lizard.” The dancers behind us stopped their whispering.

“Decent barter's more my line. Bear in mind, I’m not a mechanic in any meaningful way,” I warned.

“It’s up your laneway. All history.” He held his open hand out to me.

“Then I shall try.”  We shook. 

“’Lectricity! You know what to do!” His mate stepped back and opened a corrugated iron shutter. There behind a rolling lattice, in a dusty beam of sunlight from a skylight, was the prize in question.

A young woman.

I’d never seen her before. I would have remembered. This was a second face in a thousand. Which, based on what the previous face in a thousand here had endured, wasn’t good.

The Outcrier snapped his fingers. “Show.”

Dull-eyed, the woman turned as she knelt and lifted her curling bronze mane. I drew up, horrified and magnetized. She was slender, honey-skinned, scarcely allowed clothing. And the brand on the back of her neck wasn’t a Gastown brand.

It was the Immortan’s.

After a good moment, she released her dark hair to cover her full lips and dark, deep-set eyes with her hands, despairing as the Outcrier intoned, “This is the chief prize for the Gastown Race. The culmination of a year’s worth of Murderdome triumphs. A concubine for the winner, nothing less than a former Wife of the Immortan!”

Cutsnake stamped up. “Brands can be faked. You promised me proof.”

“If you’d shut your pipes for one minute, you’re about to get that proof!”

While the brawny men argued, I stepped up to the lattice. “Did they leave you a name, child?”

She peered through her fingers, then dropped her hands. Her eyes blazed alive. “Those tattoos…did you know the History Woman? Miss Giddy? Did you know Sophia?” She sprang up, tall as trees used to be, and laced her fingers through the metal. “The Immortan gave her to us because he loved us – we were his treasures – she said there were other History People. I thought there could never be anyone else like her, she was so strange, but you’re here!”

“Your name?” I repeated.

“He called me Lolly, the Immortan did.”

I said, calmly as I could, “Yes. I knew her, and she remembered you. She wrote about you, in the Immortan’s Vault. Your sister remembers you, too, she’s still alive. She was convinced that you weren’t.”

“Tidda!” Lolly had flung herself fully against the lattice now. “Tell them I’m alive, tell Tidda she can say my name –“

‘Lectricity Boy sealed her back in.

A moment’s silence fell.

That young woman was indeed chronicled in the History Woman’s journals, a Wife disappeared from the Vault when her hour as a breeder was done. This despite her being a young woman sparked with life and intelligence. Like all those Sophia had taken to her heart as her Wasteland daughters, both amongst the Wretched and amongst the Wives. The ones I helped as I could, when they would have me. For memory and history, for their survival and the new world they were creating. This one before me kept Sophia’s memory alive, too, even as her suffering and slavery continued.

I turned to the Outcrier. “ _You fucking cunt!_ ”

He smiled, almost tranquil. “You cuss like my dads. Takes me back.” He said to Cutsnake. “There you have it. Certified by History as a Wife of the Immortan. And if she’s that nice to an old guy, imagine how nice she’ll be to you.”

Cutsnake rocked back on his heels. “All right, Outcrier, all right. Count me in.” They shook hands.

The Outcrier said, “Nothing like a shine concubine from the Wasteland’s former ruler for a man with plans. Make your mark on the slate there.”

“Hello? I’m still here!” I snapped.

The Outcrier didn’t miss a beat. “And you’ve dealt right by me. What’s your pleasure? Guzzoline tokens? Firepower?”

“You can’t do this!” I yelped. “She’s a woman! A human being!”

“Sure I can. Bought her fair and square. If I choose to give her away, that’s my business – my _Gastown_ business. Besides, nobody’s laid a hand on her. Like Cutsnake said, I got mine.”

‘Lectricity spoke up. “She’s lucky. Going to the race winner, she’s guaranteed an owner who can fight for her.”

I took a breath to collect myself. “What do you want for her? I’ve got the Citadel at my back!”

“Uh-uh. No deal. I’ve made a deal with the competitors, the audience. They’re showing up to win her or watch her.” Around us, the dancers rustled.

“You could win her, if I wasn’t going to already,” Cutsnake chuckled. There was him – and then there were the Buzzards, two fates worse than death. 

“Fine, then. As my compensation I want a space in your race for a Citadel driving team. I’ve got two kamicrazy War Boys and a nitro-boosted racer ready to go!” I lied, wildly.

The Outcrier sneered. “War Boys ain’t my favorite flavour. I’m running a show here. I’m committed to quality. Come to think of it…” The Outcrier’s face lit with a sudden terrible grin. “There’s one, and only one Citadel driver I’ll accept. Best of the best! Put the legend to the test!” He turned and wrote on his slate:

THE BAG OF NAILZ

I gritted, “You’ve spelled it wrong.”  

‘Lectricity started. “Hey. Hey! Don’t touch what he put down!”

He was too late. I had already erased it and written:

IMPERATOR FURIOSA

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From FLLV:  
>  _No sympathy for the devil, keep that in mind._  
>  _A man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident._  
>  _Once you get locked into a serious drug connection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can._  
>  *  
>  _kirituhi_ \- A tattoo inspired by Māori artwork and traditional tattooing that is not the same as a traditional/tapu-bound _tā moko_.  
>  _Mad as a cut snake_ – Australian saying, can refer to both anger and insanity.  
>  _At your service and your family’s_ – Tolkien, The Hobbit.  
>  _Tell Tidda she can say my name_ – Tidda and Lolly are of Australian Indigenous heritage. For many groups, it is forbidden to speak the names of the dead, due to the overwhelming grief this causes. Between Lolly’s vanishing in _Weave a Circle_ and her appearance here, approximately three years have passed.


	3. The Underbelly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To get a message to the Citadel, History traverses Gastown’s sewers in contaminated company. Medicine, law, and comparative Wasteland economics get dragged through the gutter, too.
> 
> _Wordburger: In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity._

Wordburger: _In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity._

* * *

Metal stairs swayed beneath us as we left the Outcrier. Oxidative Damage muttered, awestruck, “I knew you were on the Citadel Council but I didn’t know you could order Imperator Furiosa around!”

“I can’t,” I admitted. “I can send her the message through the heliographers but she’ll decide if she’s doing it or not.”

“You’re wordburgering again.”

“ _Wordburger: heliographers._ Gastown’s Tower sends messages to the top of the Citadel using the sun and mirrors and an old code. We’d better hurry.”

Turning back towards central Gastown, I paused. “Do you know which way we go?”

Oxy thumbed behind us. “He might!” His hearing was better than mine. Lighter steps rapped down the stairs, the former slave and current messenger, Silence. He darted past us, fully masked. “See his hand there? He wants us to follow!” As a Gastown official, he'd be going in the right direction, at least.

We rounded the same corner he had to find him waiting. Silence gestured with a piece of the Outcrier’s chalk in his hand, pointed at a pipe. “It’s a message,” I said. Looks, health, literacy – only the best had sufficed for the People Eater’s sex slaves. As with the Immortan's...

I found his note civil and to the point:

_cutsnake wants your hide_

I smiled. “Thank you, I do get that a lot. It’s already spoken for. I’ve promised it to the Citadel after I die.” Furiosa would probably claim it herself after my message.

As I spoke, Silence added:

_cutsnake wants your hide DEAD = no furiosa_

“Ah-hm. That’s different.”

He swiped the writing away, made a flurry of hand signals. Pointing at me, at Oxy, at himself, the barter sign, his hand over his heart, holding up three fingers, raising one hand high, as if showing the height of a tower. He repeated the barter sign, rubbing his fingers together.

I was grateful to Sophia. In our Wretched years, she’d helped a cleft-lipped girl improve her speech. There had been a lot of hand signals at the start. So I had an idea what Silence was indicating, and it served me right. This was what I got for offering Citadel barter to the Outcrier. Worse, this one had an idea of what was available. The Jade had slid him into a Citadel delegation, once, and he'd had a good reconnoitre, no doubt on her behalf. “You’ll get us to the Tower to send our message if I barter you up? You personally.”

Silence made every possible sign of agreement. Oxy said, “More follows. We need to move.”

When even I could hear them, there was no time for clarification. I snapped, “Deal. Which way?”

Silence took an immediate left into a tight tangle of pipes. We squeezed after. When the pipes opened a breath, Silence knelt, pulling out keys. He was over a manhole. We’d be going underground! I heard voices: someone had noticed the chalk smear on the pipes. “Oxy, help him.”

Oxy lifted the manhole lid in short order. I had only a moment to admire its text and design, _SEVEN SISTERS PETROLEUM – Fueling the World_ , before our guide whisked down. I creaked after him. Oxy hunkered last, and the manhole relocked as he turned it. Once all three of us were on an underground walkway over some noisome puddles, Silence wrote on the wall again. My eyes were still adjusting to the foul dimness, but the white chalk stood out.

_barter goods?_

“Got this.” I held out the satchel. “Citadel water.”

He snatched one, then gestured us on. We had a mutually acceptable deal, a qualified guide, and our tattooed hides. We'd see what we had when we came out the other side.

Shortly, we were at a gridded metal door. Silence paused and removed his mask. I frowned: somebody ahead would need to be persuaded. He folded back his jacket and half-unbuttoned a shirt. How much persuasion were we going to need?  Prepared, he banged on the door.

It opened on a white-lit scene, surgical kleig lights blasting our eyes. A flesh mechanic’s shop, a bloodstained table with straps, shelves of improvised equipment. A rack awaited one of the Wasteland’s hapless healthy, a blood bag: I was unspeakably relieved that it was empty. What kind of flesh mechanic would set up down here?

One even more disreputable than the old Organic Mechanic. This one lurched out from behind the door, a filthy bear of a man. His voice was blurred, heavy, as he gave Silence an unfocused smile. “Off schedule, aren’t you? No, you’ve brought a mate,” he said, seeing Oxy. Then he peered at me. “What’s this? Both real? Mnh. Didn’t think that batch of nitrous was that good.” If someone thought I was the hallucination, when I was between a lizard-themed road warrior and an improbable blonde, the situation had tipped from Wasteland bluster to postapocalyptic absurdity. _Wordburger: Too weird to live, too rare to die!_ I’d survived this in the past by simply rolling with it.

Silence pointed at a door on the other side of the space. He ran a hand across his eyes, blinding himself for a moment. Then, he plucked the entire satchel of trade water off my shoulder and held it out to the flesh mechanic.

Roll with it, indeed. “Citadel aqua-cola. It’s yours if you let us through and you didn’t see us,” I said.

The flesh mechanic took the satchel. “Here I am, talking to nitrous dreams. Perhaps I’ll open this back door for a moment.” He ambled over and cracked the door, then weighed Silence’s shoulder with a heavy hand. “Any help for what ails you? Fix you for a price. My best work, right here. Used to be the People Eater’s property. Been taking my cures for an Amnesty’s round. Look at him! Still unblemished. Full-life!” The young man’s false smile was a terrible thing.

Leprosy and syphilis could take twenty years, once they had a hold. “ _Wordburger: not dead yet!_ ” I said, brightly.

“S’what the People Eater used to say,” he beamed. “Enjoy the Underbelly.” Silence extracted himself, followed by the two of us. The second door closed on us, leaving only the flesh mechanic’s drainlike laughter.

This was the Underbelly, then – the sewers and lower pipes of Gastown. The chiaroscuro labyrinth had a fetid tang, boomed with strange noises. Pipes above and below us were sick with rust. Voices came and went. Solitary forms, half-life or drugged, huddled in spare corners. A cluster of pale waifs took a gander at us, then fled. Oxy was frozen on the walkway. “You all right?”

“It’s…very…wrong,” the Wastelander hissed. "Everyone down here is sick."

That explained the flesh mechanic being down here. He'd followed his market. _“_ You’re very right.” This was an ideal moment to cement our deal with our guide. “ _Wordburger: some lovely filth down here._ Thank you for helping. Both helping us, and through us, that poor woman back there.”

Silence shrugged his lean shoulders and paused beneath a grating letting some light down. Here, he wrote on the concrete wall.

_cutsnake = terrible owner_

“I agree.” As at the Citadel, so in Gastown: it took having been ground down, owned or dehumanized by the Triumverate, to rediscover empathy.  We’d been lucky to run into someone like this.

_i’ll be a much better owner_

Then again, maybe not.

“Better owner of…who?”

Silence cocked an eyebrow.

_our deal upstairs. tower passage, message = three citadel things_

Here I’d thought I’d been negotiating passage for the three of us. That would show me. I cursed my human weakness, foolish readiness to follow someone healthy – no, assured – no, just admit it, good looking. He was a lightweight, scarcely armed, but his inability to talk was on his side. Damage him much, and we wouldn’t find our way out.

“What did you have in mind?”

Silence smiled, eyes going diamond-hard, lifted one dramatic finger. He started to write:

_the feral named_

“Stop right there!” I roared. “I can’t give you people!”

_you tried to buy her up there_

“To get her out of Gastown. You said it yourself: three Citadel things. I can’t give you Citadel people because the first law of the Citadel is that _we are not things!_ ”

His entire stance expressed outrage. _Wordburger: and now a precision display of bad temper!_

Ethics meant nothing here, this was Gastown – and that was the solution. “The Citadel has to follow Gastown law when we deal with you. That means you follow ours when you deal Citadel. Our second law was laid down by my very own tribeswoman: _you cannot own a human being!_ So harden up, mate, and ask for something else.”

Silence retreated slightly. Then, he pressed a flat palm: give me a minute.

I waited, contemplating his counterparts back at the Citadel. They had distanced themselves from their ghastly past as the Immortan’s sex slaves, called Wives by him, to claim their own identity as Sisters. After their revolution, the Sisters have taken power the way they know how. This involves a lot of shouting over the tannoy, affectionate religiosity, and catchy phrases. They have a grim Imperator backing them up and a History person (me) keeping their difficult human resource (Corpus) distracted. People like the Sisters: they have charisma, particularly as a group. They hit our human weakness, to follow someone healthy and assured and…the rest. This was awfully like the Immortan’s model, but I was going to have another drink of aqua-cola instead of saying so out loud.  

The Sisters took it to a higher level, thanks, in some degree, to the History Woman. Miss Giddy had given them knowing, seen them as people, extended true care as a counterbalance to the Immortan’s corrupt paternalism. Now the Citadel had laws that echoed the ideals they had evolved together. What would the lot of them have become without her? With only Furiosa’s anger and vengeance firing their freedom?

I was getting a glimpse here. This ambitious profiteer had a different model. Someone who’d flaunted a body of excess as a sign of privilege, lived for the deal, counted the cost… and held the Wasteland to ransom over a barrel of guzzoline. Now I was over a barrel, too. 

“What’s the hold up? Were you going to ask for three people?” Silence pressed the palm again.

Oxy chose this moment to ask, “Was I one of them?”

Good question. The term _feral_ got applied liberally around the Citadel nowadays, from rougher or more afflicted Wretched, to the Vuvalini, to recruited fighters like Oxy and odd bodies like Max.

Silence made some more gestures. I translated for Oxy, “He says it was close, you’re a good fighter, I think you were his fourth pick – so it _was_ three people – oh, for fuck’s sake!” He’d started to write again.

_no slaves / indenture / bounty_

“That’s correct, at the Citadel,” I temporized.

_GIVING AWAY aqua-cola when WE barter guzz_

“It’s ours. Nothing’s stopping us.”

_THEN HOW DOES CITADEL WORK_

Incredulously, I said, “You want an economics lesson about the new Citadel? As one of the three things I owe you?”

He banged his hands together and pointed both index fingers at me.

This was going to come back and bite the Citadel hard at some trade negotiations. But I’d managed to barter him _down_ , to within my existing resources. “Deal. But let’s get moving. Time is…barter. I’ll tell you as we go.”

We began to walk through the echoing, stinking passageways. “Yes, we give water away. If you make it to the Citadel, we’ll give you water. The Sisters have declared it so. Us older and harsher ones at the Citadel haven’t stopped them, for reasons. Water’s difficult to move. It’s heavy. It needs containers. People can only take so much water at one time. We’re hard to get to. If you can get to us, if you have the resources to do that, we probably want to talk to you.”

He wrote a quick note:

_water  = bait_

“Nicely put. The Immortan made a huge deal out of the water. And he mismanaged it terribly. Ever hear of aquifer drawdown?” I gave him a quick explanation. Well, I thought it was quick, only a couple of digressions into Quaternary topsoils in this region and the Water Wars. Soon, I said, “Back to the Citadel. Despite the way we’ve damaged ourselves with aquifer drawdown, water is a medium cost item for us. Getting the water to Gastown or the Bullet Farm is where the value's added. So is the food, the produce we send to Gastown. Our irrigation against the postapocalyptic climate is hugely wasteful. One piece of fruit takes a week’s worth of drinking water out of the mouth of a Wretch. To say nothing of the Green Thumbs that grow it, the soil husbanded for it, the insects and flesh and dung that nurture it. In a way the fruit trees are more important than the people.”

The Citadel’s produce swap couldn’t and didn’t feed all of Gastown. It went to those in Gastown’s governing tower and the staff eternally indentured in the refinery. For the rest of the place…as we were led, beneath Gastown, I was finding out.

We passed stacked rat cages with too many eyes gleaming out of them. Unspeakable sheets of glass, imprisoning seething walls of insects. Tanks of…I don’t know what. It was green. I like to think it was algae. Then again, Soylent Green was people. This was the alternative to the Citadel and its costly, beautiful green heights. Low-down, sour-water survival in the ruins.

“Our cost to Gastown in barter is for that nurturance, for that risk, for those resources. If things improve in a lifetime or two, we’ve got what it takes to spread the wealth. Plants adapted to this world we live in that might grow to feed others. If we fail…the Wasteland is waiting.”

Silence turned back, eyes hollow with horror. I’d tapped into something there, though I had no idea what. Maybe just the idea of eating what the rest of Gastown did. His looks hadn’t come from a near-Wretched diet. Warlords’ slaves were well fed and watered. The world was fallen so far that many found that compensation, even justification. Time to address that.

“Now, the people side of the Citadel. In the past forty-odd oldyears, three levels of power have emerged: the wretched masses, those charismatic and strong enough to be tribe leaders or warlords, and those strong enough to command the warlords because they control resources. Like the former Triumverate. You’ll note I don’t count fighting types. They look powerful, and they’re costly to have around, like the fruit trees, but they have a tendency to get used. Used up. They’re a resource. No offense meant, Oxy. Though look at your history: you were left for dead when they thought you didn't have any fight left in you.”

"And the Great Goanna Spirit proved them wrong!"

“The current Citadel doesn’t eliminate social castes, but being part of the wretched masses means something very different than it did an oldyear ago. If I describe our compensation, frankly, we do sound like a lot of slaves. Food, aqua-cola, shelter from the toxic storms, defense from the toxic fighters, some entertainment, the right to the salvage on our backs. _Wordburger: we're an anarcho-syndicalist commune!_ ”

“You have to earn your way. But we are not things. Not any more. Our labor is the commodity, not everything about us. We have our own minds. Freedom of movement. The freedom of our bodies. If somebody’s bartering a body with travellers, that’s their choice. If somebody’s branded, it’s because they picked it out themselves. And because of that…you can say that our small portions are the part of the Citadel that belongs to us. Because the Citadel belongs to those of us who make it, now.”

Silence looked back at us with a sceptical sneer.

“ _Wordburger: Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?_ _Brought peace?_ You can get cranky, pick it apart, go somewhere that tries to balance the worst of the Fall with the worst of the Before-time, something called capitalism. Everyone out for themselves. Like here. How’s that been working out for you?”

“Or you could let go of caring. _Wordburger: Always look on the bright side of life!_ I’m wearing pretty much what I did among the Wretched. My physical belongings fit in a trug. My bones will, too. I get to choose how I’ll die – and that means I’m choosing how I live _._ ”

“Are we there yet?”

Silence gestured wearily at another ladder. Oxy couldn’t climb it fast enough. The aperture was open shortly, and I hauled myself up.

_Wordburger: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition._

We had entered a dungeon. Like the flesh mechanic’s space, it was bloodstained, but the stains were dark and old. All the signifiers of torture were there, chains, manacles, a rack, human-sized cages, leather implements. I touched a leather item and dropped it. That wasn’t cracked, dry leather salvage. It was fresh and supple, recently tanned. They'd claimed someone’s hide.

Silence was waiting by the door. “Let us out!” Oxy rumbled. Silence let him rattle it, enjoying our discomfiture. The key was somewhere on his person, and he was scrawling another message, with a fine sense of timing.

_2 nd thing_

_your healers = famous_

_you heard cutsnake, abdominous_

_yours good enough to clear me?_

“Yes.”

He dropped the chalk.

“When I said the Citadel belonged to everyone there, that includes what used to be the Immortan’s. Privileges like medicine. But you might find our cure worse than any disease.”

The Citadel’s deepest secret was a lab. I wasn’t even sure if I was supposed to know about it, but Corpus got talkative, sometimes. One of the Citadel’s deepest compromises was keeping that lab going, trickling out addictive chrome in exchange for the demented technicians’ knowledge about other things. Like steroids, and antibiotics, and antifungals. In the past, they’d kept the Immortan alive and virile, staved off Corpus’ frequent infections, made the blood bag transfusions possible. Now this Citadel wealth, too, was being spread. A ruthless antibiotic cocktail cooked up to try and help afflicted Wretched had earned a dire name: the kill-or-cure. It seemed to work. _Wordburger: Not dead yet!_ Unless. Not everyone lived through one to three days of pharmaceutically induced dysentery. The kill-or-cure's mortality risk remained more attractive than mutated leprosy.

I only told Silence the basics. “Everyone who takes it has to stick near a latrine for a day or so. One in ten don’t survive it. It’s still the best the Wasteland’s got. So, a dose of Citadel kill-or-cure. Done?”

His expression of blazing relief didn’t shift. He unlocked the door and gestured us through.

We emerged into….the People Eater’s old quarters, on the ground floor of the Establishment tower. He must have moved down when edema took his right leg.  Of course he was the sort to have a dungeon connected to the Underbelly as part of his rooms. We traversed a suite done in once-hypermodern taste, black, white, purple, shots of yellow. I glimpsed framed art and books that I ached to filch for the Citadel. It was all dusty, neglected, gradually being pillaged.

It was a relief to leave for the top of Gastown’s Establishment tower. This was an airy glass box of a room where Gastown’s elite held negotiations and dinner parties. From here, when the atmosphere allowed, you could see most of the Wasteland, the Citadel on the horizon. Silence's hard, heedless expression was in place again by the time we arrived. He had Oxy open a ceiling trapdoor: a ladder slid out of it. “Someone got a message?” a woman called down.

“Yes!” I climbed.

Up in the tiny crow’s nest, the petite heliographer and I did a quick deal. She accepted the box tickets the Outcrier had given me for the races (I was furious with him, but I wasn’t a complete fool). In exchange, she kept our message off Gastown’s official books. She deserved something anyway: my message to the Citadel was long. I took it as a good omen that she was a woman, one of the few I'd seen so far in Gastown outside of a cage. Soon, she handed me the Citadel’s reply. THERE SUNDOWN. MEET BRIDGE GATE. WILL… Apologetically, she said, “The last word wasn’t clear. It was either ‘WILL RACE’ or ‘WILL RAGE’.”

“Thank you. I think they’ll do both.”

Despite this, I felt some relief as I descended. Oxy and I were still alive. The message was sent. Furiosa was on her way. The young woman had a chance. I even had some time to try and compose an explanation for the Citadel that would delay having my hide tanned. _Wordburger: This man, he doesn't know when he's beaten! He doesn't know when he's winning, either._ But I’d done what I could.

I descended. Oxidative Damage was cross-legged on the room’s large table, attempting meditation. “How’d you fellows get on?”

“He cares not for the Great Goanna Spirit,” Oxy huffed. “He’s over there doing drugs.”

Silence was by the window-wall closest to the Citadel, sipping the water he’d filched. He stood smoothly, tossing aside a broken amyl nitrate ampoule from the Outcrier’s table. I shrugged. Amyl was a five-minute mini-high, the Gastown equivalent of a coffee break. “Have you decided on your third thing?”

Silence went over to the table and wrote:

_let you know_

We were all making it up as we went along. But. “Listen again. You've got a deal with me, and that works as long as I'm alive. I’m seventy-six oldyears of age. I’m old. Ancient. I’ve been irradiated, incinerated, and dehydrated. You’re fortunate I’m not a cancer case. You’re bloody lucky if I wake up from a nap! So, the sooner, the better.” I sighed. “Decide by the time you get your kill-or-cure. When two terrifying old women come to Gastown looking for you, calling themselves Vuvalini, that’s what they’ll be delivering.” He pointed below. “Send them to this building? All right.”

Oxidative Damage was gazing at a different horizon, chewing as he ruminated. I asked a question that never had a good answer. “What are you eating?”

Serenely, Oxy handed over half of a bundle of leaves and roots. “It was the only food on the Outcrier’s table. I will eat no unclean flesh, only that bestowed by the Great Goanna – “

“That isn’t food!” I yelped, plucking a distinctive twisted root out of the mess. When I lived at a settlement, we pulled that plant up whenever we saw it, an invasive hallucinogen, dangerous to our animals. “ _Wordburger: ibogaine!_ Have you been chewing on this the whole time I was upstairs?”

“Shhh. The Great Goanna Spirit has sent her precursors here.”

“That’s a yes, then.” Very suddenly, Oxy’s pupils dilated. I swore. I didn’t dare leave him here, not when he was fourth on the list.

Silence was making the first noise I’d heard him utter, laughing in his throat at Oxy’s misfortune. I glared at him. “You. You seem to have a grip on this aspect of Gastown recreation. Have you got anything to help with this?”

In response, Silence leapt back into the horrifying tower elevator. I managed to get Oxy to follow. In the lobby downstairs, Silence held up a finger for a waiting moment, and vanished back into the People Eater’s quarters. The lobby was calm. Oxy liked the cool floor, got very involved tracing the tile grout.

Silence re-emerged with two items. One was a bottle of salvaged pre-apocalyptic gin. Perhaps he thought the liquor would be a decent sedative for Oxy. I wasn’t going to correct him. The other was a metal collar, welded to a chain. He put the end of the chain in my hand and gestured at Oxy with the collar.

Oxy’s musclebound two meters twitched as he gazed into the distance. I sighed. “Add them to my tab.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _he'd had a good reconnoitre, no doubt on her behalf..._ The History Man is wrong - the story [Scav Hunt](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5609476) has more.  
>  _Seven Sisters Petroleum – Fueling the World_ – From the script for _Mad Max Road Warrior_ – the leader of the refinery team, Pappagallo, had a backstory as the CEO of this petroleum company. So there’s a canon company to place behind Mad Max oil refinery.  
>  _Too weird to live, too rare to die!_ \- FLLV  
>  _Ibogaine!_ \- One of the few hallucinogenic plants in Australia, originally from Africa and successfully naturalised. 
> 
> _Monty Python Wordburgers_  
>  All Monty Python wordburgers after the story's absurd tipping point this chapter, because the History Man has MONTY PYTHON amongst his canonical tattoos, and because...we can!  
>  _Not dead yet!_ – Monty Python and the Holy Grail  
>  _some lovely filth down here_ \- Monty Python's Flying Circus  
>  _Always look on the bright side of life_ – Life of Brian  
>  _And now a precision display of bad temper_ – Monty Python’s Flying Circus  
>  _We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune_ – Monty Python and the Holy Grail  
>  _Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? Brought peace?_ – Life of Brian  
>  _Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition_ – Monty Python and the Holy Grail  
>  _This man, he doesn't know when he's beaten! He doesn't know when he's winning, either._ – Monty Python’s Flying Circus


	4. The Imperator

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Citadel race crew arrive in Gastown, including Furiosa and Capable. Capable brings sanity wherever she goes, but this might be too much even for her.

_Wordburger: No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted._

* * *

Sober and spiritual, Oxidative Damage had been a very good bodyguard. Glassy-eyed and ranting at the end of a chain, he was a _great_ bodyguard. Nobody was going to interfere with us as we went through Gastown’s greasy laneways to the bridge.

Our previous guide, cold-eyed Silence, had finished with us at the door of the Establishment Tower. His last 'extra' was showing me, with disturbing sleight of hand, how to lock Oxidative Damage in and out of the collar. I was glad to be rid of him. En route, I stopped in shady spots to talk Oxy out of, or around, his ibogaine-induced hallucinations. The chain kept Oxy from dashing off more than once. Walking through Gastown was hallucinatory for a Before-time relic like me at the best of times, but there was no way around it. We had to meet Furiosa and the race team at the Gastown bridge.

At the bridge, it was time for some essential barter. We needed water, like it or not. Oxy was my responsibility now, and he needed to stay hydrated. Soon I was chatting to a vendor selling filtered Gastown groundwater: Aqua-Pepsi. He was one of the former Wretches who’d hitched over when it was allowed. I asked him how he was finding the place.

“Chrome as! Never seen so much stuff. So many things. There’s lights and music and the fights. You never know what’s gonna happen.” He coughed. The cough kept going. I took a discreet step back, though it was probably asthma, induced by the stinking chemical atmosphere. After a moment, he managed, “We’re all gonna die soon, might as well be livin’. For some aqua-pepsi, how about this one? Bloke I get it from, his is almost as good as aqua-cola.” The vendor held up a bottle.

I squinted at it. I didn’t like the way the light angled through three layers of gray and beige in the water. “No thanks.”

“This one? Very fresh.”

I watched it for a moment. “Something’s _moving_ in there.”

The vendor tucked it away. “This one. The best one on me today. I was going to drink it myself, but…”

I held it up to the sun. There was only the slightest gray tinge, no sediment. With my luck, it would probably glow in the dark, but I was certain that the gin bottle would, too. “Sold.”

The vendor accepted two fingers of gin into one of his empties. “Enjoy your Aqua-Pepsi. Taste the challenge!”

“Oxy. Would you like some water?”

He recoiled in horror from the bottle. “Unclean! Unclean!”    

I ventured a mouthful. My throat tried to close up in self-defense. The Immortan’s water dole to the Wretched had been nectar compared to that, sand and all. “Shall we move out of the road, at least?”

Oxy wouldn’t move. “We’re waiting for the sun.”

“The sun’s here, Oxy, we’re right in it.“ He didn’t listen, hunkering down onto the sandy asphalt. I let him be, draping my shirt over his bald, tattooed head to shelter his mental journeying. Everyone was still giving us a wide berth, until my lackadaisickal driver and novice lancer returned.

Treads was shame-faced. Bogan was looking everywhere except at the pair who was trailing them. Treads was brave enough to say, “Uh. These blokes. We asked them what you said we should when you're hiring, uh, _intimate professionals_ , and they said nobody was bossing them and they could do what they liked and it turns out they thought we were inviting them back to the Citadel and – is that all right?”

Under salvaged clubwear, their Gastown friends were young, the same age as Treads. One, looking down at mismatched shoes, was a little pockmarked, a little familiar: another new-in-town Wretched, regretting the move. The other had direct, tired eyes. I asked him, “What’s your grasp of Gastown economics?”

He took a step back, outraged. “We don’t do that People Eater filth! I may not have a citizen’s brand but I have my limits and I look out for my mate -–"

“An excellent start. Can you get these two and their vehicle to the contestants’ spot for the Gastown Races? The lot of you need to hold a space there for a Citadel crew. Furiosa’s going to be racing,” I explained. “Keep these two out of street trouble here and you’ve earned a place in the Citadel by the end of the race.” 

At this shiny, chrome, historic turn of events, Treads and Bogan went spare. Their new friends, given the tiniest sliver of authority by my words, herded them away. When the Citadel arrived, either I’d sort them all out, or there’d be room at the Citadel for at least one more, after the Citadel disposed of me.  

I had a moment to contemplate the whole sorry business. A former Wife of the Immortan, the hapless Lolly – who remembered the History Woman - was up as a human prize for the Gastown Race. This was legal, in Gastown, greeted with hungry opportunism by the rest of the Wasteland. I had tangled the Citadel up in this by trying to free her. By so doing, I had brought one of Corpus’ risk forecasts from the future to the present. “The Wives are running this place like a bunch of idealists. It can’t last. Either the Wasteland is going to attack or they’re going to hear about something out there they can’t stand. When that happens, your hydrology concerns will be the least of our problems.”

Toast the Knowing said much the same thing, from the Wives’ perspective. “It’s up to us to show the Citadel they are people – and we need to take that to the Wasteland, too. As women, we were prisoners in the Vault. We don’t want to be prisoners in the Citadel. If we don’t change the Wasteland, we will be.” So they gave water away, to show their power. Toast was enough of a feature on Rig trade runs that she had a Wasteland name now, the Knowing. And, though she took the Citadel law of No Unnecessary Killing with her wherever she went, there were notches on a rifle she carried.

The Immortan’s former Wives had always been Wasteland legends. The Wives who had survived the Fury Road, now the Sisters, were half-deified by the Citadel. Another former Wife, the Jade, had sold herself to the People Eater long ago, becoming complicit in Gastown. A third of the other survivors were accounted for amongst the Milking Mothers. That had been an unpleasant life under the Immortan’s hand, but they lived longer than the ones he’d cast out amongst the Wretched. Women shared rumors of escapees, fierce former Wives stealing vehicles and heading off for the horizon. Men said that this was impossible. Us History People had learned that nothing was too strange to happen in the Wasteland.

The Immortan, being human, had been fonder of some Wives. A little liking could keep a former Wife from the Wretched, handed down instead to one of his Imperators. That had been Lolly’s fate. The Citadel’s new Council had discussed her. She’d been lost in a dice game to some Gastown terror, a year before the Fury Road. The new Citadel had outlawed gambling, sought the lost Wife to embrace her as a sister, but never found her. Until today, when I was asked to confirm her provenance, before they gave her away as the human prize for the Gastown Race.

There was one more former Wife living…if an occasional word from the Sisters, the suspicion of the History Woman, was true.

Imperator Furiosa.

She’d become a raider, a honed human weapon, a guardian of the Triumverate’s dread economy.  Then, she had rebelled, whisking the Immortan’s Wives away and starting a road war that changed the Citadel forever. Now, she was the Citadel’s Warlord. Against the Wasteland and our dubious allies, the Citadel needed our very own bloodstained napalm-scorched terror for a while, and would for a while to come.

Feet hammering on pipes and raucous street cries jolted me back to the present. “Citadel! War Boys! FURIOSA!” Gastown officials on motorbikes, flamethrowers on their backs, took positions. Everyone else was fleeing the asphalt to pause within the refinery pipes, to watch from safety.

I peered ahead. The Citadel had arrived in force. There were security bikes, a Rig with the tanker replaced by a flatbed with a tarp-protected cargo, ten War Boys in old-school white. They were carrying good rifles with good form, after lessons from the Vuvalini. I nodded with approval. _Wordburger: When you bring an act into this town, you want to bring it heavy._

“Time to get out of the road, Oxy.” I spoke several times; gave the chain a light pull; took my shirt back: shook his shoulder.

“Oxy! Come on!” I was pulling frankly on the chain as the Rig bore down. Nothing could move him. This being Gastown, I heard watchers placing bets on our probable demise.

Ahead of us, brakes began to scream.  I met the eyes of the skull honored on the Rig's grille. The Rig juddered to a stop, four meters ahead of us, sending a cloud of dust wafting over Oxy and myself.

Above the ticking, steaming, ferocious grille, behind the dirty windscreen, two people were in the Rig’s cab.  I could identify one by the gleam of metal. The other was wrapped and goggled.

The Citadel snipers whipped their arms around, pointing my way. I looked behind me to see the threat I’d missed. The road was conspicuously empty. Oh. They were pointing their rifles at me.

The top of the Rig’s cab rattled, its sunroof opening. The wrapped woman levered out.

Oxy turned his face up and said, reverently, “The sun. She’s here.”

I’d expected Toast, but - “Capable? What are you doing here?”

Capable was enveloped in a brown duster, her head under white scarves and goggles. She pulled back the goggles to scream, “Is this a coup?”

“What?”

“We’ve got Corpus under lockdown so if the two of you thought you’d draw out Toast and Furiosa this way and seize the Citadel while she was gone, you've failed.“

I waited until I was sure she was done, gestured with the gin bottle. “Do I look like I’ve organized a coup?”

She clenched her fists and cried, “It makes more sense than this! You’re standing here with a lizard-man on a leash and a bottle of shine after you've signed Furiosa up for the Gastown Races to try and win back one of the Immortan’s former Wives. One of my SISTERS! _What are you doing?_ ”

I skipped over the skiving, bribery, cannibalism, slavery, drugs, dungeons, intimate professionals, and comparative economics. “Surviving.”

“Why?”

“I’ve been asking myself the same question. Are we talking, or am I getting shot?” I spread my arms, looking at the War Boys. “I don’t want to hold you up here!”

Capable put her forehead in her hand, then ducked down. There was a moment’s confabulation inside the Rig cab. The coup theory made sense, compared to the Fury Road. Citadel snipers were still covering me. The skull on the grille was smiling recklessly. I reflected on my new postapocalyptic low, tried a mouthful of gin. Not bad, though the botanical notes had faded.

Capable’s head popped up again. I gestured up at the truck cab with the gin bottle and shouted, “If I’m going to be shot, can I hand Oxy over to you? He’s got…food poisoning. It’s gone to his head.”

She called back, “Furiosa says to get in.” At her words, Oxy stood smoothly and followed to where she opened the cab door.

I entered very, very cautiously.

Furiosa was in the driver’s seat, making our heights even, a rarity. Age has shrunk me to Toast's height. Furiosa is taller than nine-tenths of the Wasteland's men. Being eye to eye with her was no less disturbing than having her loom over me, both of us wary and shielded. She turned to glare at me, a blued-steel pistol in her flesh right hand. Her voice was cold with controlled rage. “I spent seven thousand Citadel days doing what old men said to do. When I wasn’t being schlanged around by Gastown freaks. You’ve managed to combine the two. This had better be worth it.”

“I tried everything else I could with the Outcrier. Another race crew, trade goods. I’m sorry to drag you into this. At least it’s only a race.”

Furiosa’s laugh was heartless. “They don't run it like a sprint. It’s a road war.”

“A road war?!?” I’d dragged the Citadel’s Warlord, our shield against whatever nihilistic madness might be brewing in the Wasteland, into a road war.

“You didn’t know. I could tell. You didn’t say to pick a fighter.” Furiosa turned away from me to rest the pistol against the steering wheel. “Is there anything else we need to know before this begins?”

I told them about how it went with the Outcrier, and recounted the race overview that the Outcrier given to Gastown’s messenger. When I mentioned the Buzzards, Furiosa paused me, had me repeat the exact words again.

“The Buzzards want to kill Lolly as a sacrifice?” said Capable.

Furiosa said, “You didn’t know that, either. The Buzzards don’t kill their sacrifices. They live on, and on…”

For an instant, she went remote. Her eyes were more blue than green. Memory shadowed her, stripped her back to her core: anger, longing, and the desert face.

The Wretched know the desert face. To them, it’s a look, an absent expression, that says someone’s heart or mind is out in the Wasteland. Their soul would have no peace until they gave in and left for the Wasteland’s roads, to find the life or death awaiting them. I consider myself a man of science and an agnostic, tactfully neutral towards Wasteland animism. But after knowing Max Rockatansky, I believe in the desert face. When Max died, his skull would still wear it.

Max had seized the Citadel’s errand to scout for a Green Place. Since Max had left, to stay away too long, even I could see the Wasteland sky in Furiosa’s eyes. Furiosa would rather have gone herself, I thought, fulfilling the long dream of her life, the one that had sent her on the Fury Road: but she was our Warlord. Every necessary fight took her further from that dream. Every day further from that dream seemed to make her rage more inside at a life denied.

She was a _great_ Warlord.

When Furiosa spoke again, it was heavy and raw. “I don’t need to hear any more. The Outcrier wants me? He’ll get me.” I wished I could be relieved that some hideous cruelty I hadn't known about, and she had, meant I didn't have to persuade her. I wasn't. The Rig’s engine had been humming with life this entire time. Furiosa pulled the horn, once, and flicked something. The great vehicle began to pull forwards. We were on our way, and I was retained for the moment. Mostly, I felt, because I didn't matter. The women were looking through me, into their confrontation with the race, the Wasteland, the way the world was running. It wouldn't be the first time insignificance had kept me alive. Whether I deserved it or not.

The Rig didn’t make the left turn I expected, into the service alleyway ringing the refinery. Furiosa took us straight in. Capable looked around in alarm. I stared at the pipework-packed refinery ahead of us and yelped, “You can’t drive this thing through Gastown!”

Furiosa said, “Watch me.”

She began by pulling the horn twice. The crew rearranged themselves, tight on the flatbed. The Gastown crowd appreciated the show at first, until the massive vehicle began to close in on them.

The Rig refused to brake for a line of Gastown enforcers, who made the choice between their flamethrowing duty and their lives by jumping aside. After thundering on the main street for two blocks, we did jinx left to the service alley that ringed the place right inside the toxic moat. Furiosa cut us back into the main left laneway immediately once we were past the Establishment tower. Intimate professionals and vendors dashed out of our way. A couple of pipes were scraped or dinged in our passage. Nothing sprang leaks, but a siren went off. We were at 50K pretty much the entire time. I rattled around the back seat like a bad die in a Gastown gambler’s cup. Oxy stayed curled up into a ball.

When we hit northern Gastown, the laneways opened up. Furiosa took the Rig in a wide curve around the drained swimming pool of the Murderdome. The Outcrier’s warehouse had its two lower doors opened and its neon lit. With Furiosa at the wheel, the Rig fairly swam into the warehouse. In a beautiful three-point turn, Furiosa turned the Rig ninety degrees to park its precious racing burden and her durable crew entirely inside, flawlessly. When she shut the engine down, I saw the War Boys outside making the V8 sign.

Furiosa hefted a rifle and opened her door. “Come on, Capable.”

I began, “Can I help?”

“NO. You’ve done enough damage. Stay in here.” I stayed.

The elevated cab was a good vantage point to watch Furiosa stomp up the Outcrier’s stairs. Capable swayed beside her: her duster coat covered her to the ground against Gastown eyes. They took four armed Boys. Nobody stopped me as I stuck my head out the window like a Before-time dog.

For a minute and a half, I couldn’t hear much. Furiosa and Capable both spoke quietly, as a rule. The Outcrier's baritone rose in unctuous greeting, in flat discussion, in oily denial.  I caught the roll of the metal door that protected Lolly.

The shouting started. Four voices at once. The Outcrier’s bawling, Lolly’s squeal, Furiosa’s steely growl, Capable’s voice belling out clear. She’d learned how to project for a Tell, first from Sophia, then from me. The only thing I could untangle was Capable. “Let’s go, Furiosa. We’re wasting our time.” Then four Boys were protecting Capable, down the stairs, two before, two behind. Her bright head was unwrapped now, her goggles removed.

The Outcrier followed her to the top of the stairs, lights aflicker. “That’s what I like to see, chromeshine – my contestants hustling down to the track!” He moved aside with mocking courtesy, opening an arm to gesture Furiosa down. “Make yourselves at home there, Imperator. Feel free to take your race ride ‘round the central track, have a trial run, let the smellies have a good long look. The more they shout for you, the luckier you are!” 

Were they letting the Outcrier have the last word? No. Furiosa turned.

“I’m doing the race. And no more.” She spat, once, and turned.

The Outcrier managed to steal the moment back. “No play without pay. I respect that!” he roared. Beside him, ‘Lectricity silently lifted a semiautomatic, meeting our sharpshooters eye to eye.

Capable was back in first. “What’s the story?” I asked, gently.

Capable said, “Almost since the Fury Road, he’s had her. Three hundred days. Nobody’s laid a hand on her, the Outcrier said. Three hundred days for her to be afraid of when somebody would. They’d showed her off like a V8 engine for the past ten days. You were the only one to ask for her name.” She glanced back. Her crystal-gray eyes were reddened. “I’m here to help her if we win.”

I wanted to say, _after we win_ , but the Outcrier’s voice rang in my memory. I let her have our last word. As I had learned to do with the History Woman.

Furiosa vaulted back into the Rig. For Capable, she snarled, ‘”I can’t be angry at History for being half right about this. I can’t be angry at an entire Citadel cheering this on if I’m its Warlord and I’m not Scrotus. It’s never any good being angry at Gastown: for every Joe-damned sphincter here that I kill, there’s another.”

“The Outcrier…” Furiosa’s shoulders arced. I caught her eyes in the mirror, vivid as a killing desert day. “I’m taking this race off him. And killing some Buzzards. Let’s do this.” She looked into the rear view, improvised from a series of cosmetics mirrors, and yelled, “Brace yourselves.” We hadn’t had that warning for the run through Gastown.

She pulled the horn three times. The crew stamped and rattled, rifle safeties snapping live, arranging themselves again. They seemed to be flattening themselves on every hold available.

Then Furiosa bashed the Rig back into the warehouse wall.

The reinforced rear smashed open the cinderblocks there. The Rig jerked forwards again, taking out precisely the same amount of cinderblocks with its front.  From the mezzanine, I could hear the Outcrier howling.

“THE SMEG YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING _whoa there boys_ GET YOUR MEN’S ARMS DOWN AND GET THIS RUST PILE OUT ‘Lectricity, hit the course and tell them –“

Furiosa reversed again, a meter clear of the rear wall, and sailed the Rig out of the warehouse.

As she pulled out, Capable asked, “You know where the track starts?”

Furiosa said, “I remember,” and turned the wheel a touch. Steel crashed as the Rig’s rear took a farewell bite out of the Outcrier’s territory. I hoped it wouldn’t be the last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All wordburgers from Hunter S. Thompson's _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas._


	5. The Racetrack

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The audience flows in for the Gastown Race, eager for drama, V8 engines, and fresh flesh. Capable and the History Man have it out, surrounded by the Wasteland’s dream come true. And, while meaning well, they give the Outcrier’s show a dramatic launch.

_Wordburger: History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit..._

* * *

Anticlimactically, we only needed to drive a hundred and fifty meters to the start of the racetrack. I saw one of the War Boys’ enthusiastic Gastown friends waving us down. “Over there,” I said.

“Ignore that,” Furiosa said, tightly.

“I’ve already hired them!” Capable gasped with horror. I added, “To save you a spot in the lineup. I can’t be in two places at once.”

With a resigned sigh, Furiosa turned in. It was Capable who turned back to glare. She was young: her anger flashed bright. She had been schooled in the Vault: she banked the fire of it. In this hour, in this place, it would have been easy to think that Furiosa was in charge of the Citadel. But she wasn’t. Capable had far more to do with its day to day life, its councils and machineries. My true reckoning would be with her.

Treads and Bogan were waiting in the middle of the slot, doing their best to look authoritative around our rustbucket. Bogan zipped the vehicle forwards to make room for the Rig and the outriders. The race crews on either side of us became busy as ants, all of a sudden, each with a reason to face to the left or the right. The Rig ground to its elephantine halt.

“Drop the back,” Furiosa ordered. She stepped down smoothly. Capable hopped out. Oxy followed the sun, which I took as an excuse to follow him. “Well done, watch the Rig cab,” I told the Gastown pair, bluffing that I still belonged there and had any idea what I was doing.

“Tarps back, boss?” two War Boys called. Furiosa’s slight nod was all it took. Canvas whipped back.

The Citadel’s choice for the race was revealed. Treads, Bogan, and I all gasped together. She was a beautiful brute, the love child of a roadster and a metalworks, a rat rod in brushed chrome with maroon detailing. The car’s front was extended by a long, gleaming engine, fully exposed, like a ribcage around a vast steel heart and lungs. Dark-oxidized exhaust tubes made her H.R. Geiger’s joy ride. Bogan moaned, “Holy V8 and all the oil changes.”

“Forever and ever, amen,” I said.

I had been Wretched at the Citadel’s base for about four oldyears. Down there, we’d been ardent carspotters, for lack of much else to do, and I’d never seen this before. Treads was shaking with awe. He called, “Did you build it, Imperator?”

Furiosa shook her head. “From the Donk’s chop shop. The mind who mastered cars for the Immortan.” She turned and spat at his memory. “The Donk finished it the night before he died.”

“Ol’ Joe wouldn’t drive it because he was Immortan, and this car, it killed a man,” called one tarp-folding War Boy.

“Naw, he was savin’ it for his son!”

“It’s Furiosa’s now. Hers by right!”  Furiosa cut her right hand across the air: shut up, already.

I stepped closer to the already-fatal machine. There were words stamped in its engine metal: DE HAVILLAND. I yelped, “Wait a minute. That’s an aircraft engine in there. That thing’s going to fly!”

Furiosa nodded. “Two thousand five hundred horsepower.”

The War Boys all slowly made the V8, sinking to their knees.

I could hear Sophia Giddy, in my head, a favorite phrase of hers. _Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose._ Perhaps Capable did, too. She, I, and Oxy were the only ones left standing around Furiosa. I turned to Capable. “What do you want me to do?”

She was pale and pinched, goggles shifting on her forehead. “You’d better come with me and witness. Furiosa. I need guards,” she called.

The War Boys fell all over themselves to help Capable, their favorite among the semi-deified Sisters for her compassion and witnessing of Nux. The pair we got seemed reasonably focused: two of the Ace’s Old Boys, half-life fighters like himself, too wise to die historic. “You took the box tickets, didn’t you,” I said to Capable.

“It wasn’t smart not to,” she admitted. We went back down the line, Capable looking everywhere except at me. And it wasn’t the worst moment I’ve had in this apocalypse, seeing Sophia’s former student striding amongst what was left of technology. A young deiselpunk noble surveying her rivals, her path clear, a cold shoulder turned here, a slight chin incline there. Her unimpeded passage was a story of her past, of change and power. Or was it? Gastown never minded power, and I understood their thirst for aqua-cola.

I witnessed.

In between, I rubbernecked at the other competitors. They were driving everything from metal platforms with wheels to a tattered ultralight with a sail to Holdens remade with fluorescent spray paint and rusty spikes. The Buzzards’ car was, sure enough, the fast car that had let us go on the way into Gastown. It was less of a surrealist art project than their usual rides, spikes restrained to two rows on each side and random stabs on top. I didn’t like the look of Cutsnake’s Hilux, buffed down to the steel. A Hilux had been a good Outback basher of a ute before the end of the world. It was too good a contender now, with V8 ventilators snouting out of its hood. The ute had four crew, inked up like Cutsnake himself. I wondered if there was a tribal affiliation, if he might share the prize. Then I felt sick. _De Havilland_ , I told myself, _De Havilland plus Furiosa…_

The race staging took us back to the edge of Gastown’s industrial area. Before we went to the platform of privilege that was the box seats, I cleared my throat. “Capable. Some more backup?” I proffered Oxy’s chain.

She hissed, “I’ve got guards.”

“It’s to help him. You’re more important than I am, after today I expect that my Gastown reputation is shot, and I know you’re going back to the Citadel. Perhaps you know what I’m doing next?”

“You still haven’t said what you’re doing here.”

“I didn’t think you’d want to know.”

Her face went tight and hard. “I worked with you for a year. Every day sometimes. We _trusted_ you. Drugs? Whores? I don’t care. I need to know.” Contradictions straight from the heart.

“I came here to grieve the History Woman.”

“We grieve at the Citadel. You know we do! Her last words, that the new world's in waiting, we've --”

“Painted them on the walls, yes, all very _1984_ of you. But the Citadel’s grief is not mine. I never told you about the last time I saw Sophia. I didn’t know it was happening. I thought I was watching another blood-and-circuses parade of the Immortan. That bloody bogan metalocalypse truck had rolled past and the Gigahorse went by and I might have seen her in there? Perhaps? I hadn’t begun to believe it before I was distracted by my favorite mutant asking me for the meaning of life!” I breathed. "She's a very nice mutant."

“I’m here because I needed to remember Sophia Giddy and the start of it all.  And I wanted to be suitably anesthetized after I did. I hit town and Gastown happened. I dealt with the Outcrier because I felt for a voluntary amnesiac who wanted an overpriced lizard. Then I found a woman being chewed up by the apocalypse with Sophia’s name on her lips.”

There was a long pause. “This entire fall of the world has been a wretched farce. It’s too easy to abdicate from making sense. Sometimes that's been how I've survived. You women running that Citadel are the only sign of a turnaround I’ve seen in forty-five years, eight months, and sixteen days. I’m not undermining that. I have been trying to be your ally.”

“Then why are you trying to die?”

I blinked. “What makes you say that?”

“Standing in front of our gunners asking them to shoot you.” Her guards nodded. “Miss Giddy stayed behind to die. Out of our sight. Like you ran off here,” said Capable.

“She stayed behind to kill,” I said.

“It’s the same thing.” She took a deep breath. “If you’re our ally, you act like any other Citadel man. No more unnecessary death. Especially your own. You need to do some…thing…you tell us what we need to know.”

What to say to this? _All right? Yes ma'am? Deal?_ “I hear you, Capable.”

Her tight mouth relented, slightly. “Then let’s go up.” She accepted Oxy's chain.

We ascended the metal platform to the right of the stage that was called the box seats. Maybe because it was an elevated metal box that had once housed some equipment. A few other members of the Gastown elite were there, mostly refinery workers, clustering around a bar in the back of the area. Capable drifted to the front of the box, Oxy trailing respectfully, and surveyed. We had a clear view of a stage wrested out of the edge of the refinery, metal pipes turned around it belching flames periodically. A black line was drawn on the faded, cracked asphalt below. Capable pointed to it. "They'll set that line on fire when it's time to start." She sighed. “I’m from here. I always swore I’d never come back.”

“ _Wordburger:_ _yet here we are_.” I’d figured as much from the way she’d traversed the track, without a moment's hesitation. “Are you from the Underbelly?”

Capable took this calmly. “Yes. Did you find it in some records we missed?”

“No. Only that if you’d had to deal with this atmosphere and cruel sun any more than you had, you wouldn’t have your face in a thousand.”

Capable looked at me and went remote, at the same time. “Miss Giddy told me about you. She said I should look for you if I got thrown from the Vault to the Wretched. But she said to not tell the others. After how the Immortan seized her, she didn’t know what could happen to you. I did tell Angharad, though….”

“What did she say?”

“That if the Immortan tried to get rid of me she’d put her foot down. That she didn’t like being his favorite, but she’d use it to keep me alive and with her, as long as she could. She knew who’d killed the world, and she wouldn’t let it kill us.” Softly, she clenched a hand over her heart.

Tactfully, I said, “I wish I could have met Angharad. What I meant was, what did Miss Giddy say about me?”

She exhaled and smiled a touch. “That you looked about as impressive as she did, but you were a tough old boot.”

“An old boot.” Again, I could hear Sophia saying it. Capable gave it the same dry little twist. Her banking her anger, drawing out a possible enemy, taking my measure, her scathingly accurate psychoanalysis – Sophia’s tools for survival, in new hands.

“On the Fury Road, at one point, Max brought us a boot. It sounds silly. But Nux had lost one of his. So we needed it. Then Max brought _you_ in.”

“Another old boot. I hope I’ve been useful, paired up with Corpus.”

Capable surprised me. “I wish you could have met Nux. You brought up his Wretched story; I had his story from the Fury Road. We never got the middle, though. He was a talker, like you. Max isn’t. After a day with him, Nux got quiet, too. He was looking for a man to be like, a way to live.”

“If your Nux met Max, there’s no better self for him to have as an example.”

Another absent name. Perhaps one too many. Capable went oblique. “Things are better, but nobody’s the same.”

“Are you so sure?” I looked down from our place of privilege, over the sundown mob gathering below us, at the start of the track. They were drawn in for the best time to be had in the Wasteland, the Gastown Races. Gaslight and torches flared, shadows reared large. Metal-flavored music boomed out. Vendors were bartering wildly, like they'd lose all their customers tomorrow. From the edge of the stage, the Outcrier's dancers tempted, their sleek blank slates promising any desire that you projected. The crowd was War Boys, road warriors, bullet farmers, polecats, ferals and scavs, slaves and free, the thousand reshaped grotesques of the apocalypse – myself amongst them. The horde opened up for spontaneous fights and closed around drug deals and lovers’ fierce meetings.

Capable returned slightly from her memories. “Sometimes I’d ask Miss Giddy a question and she’d tell me the big History, but not her own. I know you saw the Fall. You've never done a Tell about it. What was it like?”

 _Not unlike the scene before us_ , I thought. The masses evoked Rome and boy racers and the moment when shopping blended into looting on the night of the Fall. What we had now could be fantastic anarchy, a Before-time dream of freedom unleashed. It could be all the circles of hell. What made it so was how much choice you had. And the price we’d all paid for it, rendering the earth fallow beneath our feet.

Capable said, softly, “Do you not want to talk about it?”

I sighed. _“Wordburger: It’s hard to explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.”_

“It was Australia when it was ‘Straya and a year when we still had years, decades, a twenty-first century. The oil wars all took place far away. We’d had three years of sending out troops and getting back damaged War Boys. The water wars mostly tore apart a place called North America. They called it 'civil unrest' here, 'water terrorism,' but it was a war. Anyone who says they were a hero in the water wars – they’re lying. There were no heroes. Indigenous landowners protesting deep drilling, grabs for land that had oil or water under it, cattle stations declaring themselves independent nations, huge protests against reprocessed sewage. Lines for fuel, boy racers siphoning diesel out of fat cats’ cars. My dad said he remembered the fuel lines from when he was a sprog and we would be fine, this was just another mad-as chapter of Aussie life. We still felt like the lucky country.”

“My central memory of that time is of springtime in Perth, on the campus. My cellphone was always going. There’d never been a better time to be a hydrologist, like me. It was a constant conversation. Things were going horribly wrong, but at the same time, it seemed like powers were listening to science and reason, at long last. We thought we were on the edge of a big turnaround. That spring, it felt like hope… until that fatal Wednesday.”

_“Wordburger: And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . “_

“We didn’t know then it was too little, too late.”

“So now, here in Gastown, if you’re up at the top of the Establishment Tower and you look south, with the right kind of eyes you can see the mark of destruction – the place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back. Where the world tipped over from oil and water war into nuclear annhiliation.”

The sun had descended as I spoke, darkening the course. The fractured ground below us had filled up with the partying crowd. Along the race roadway, burn barrels flared to life, fires picking out the deadly path. More fires flared along the stage. Gastown was making the works come to life to light up the show, support for the spectacle. Dancers with torches pulled two vast, tattered curtains aside. Amidst the smoke and fire, the Outcrier’s white lights shone like the last beacon of civilization. His generating shadow was black-handed behind him. He lifted his megaphone to the thrill of steel drums, and his voice lashed the crowd.

“Gastowners! Wastelanders! Citadel! Wretched and half-lives, lookers and top dogs. Tonight is for all of you, here to witness fire and blood, our Gastown Race.”

The throngs rattled and banged whatever they could reach. The racing vehicles pulled up, rumbling ready.

“For our substantial slate of contestants today, we ain’t got enough blow. But the Outcrier makes sure that you get your show. Drivers! All of you raise your _faaavorite_ hand.”

Furiosa’s flyer of a car was right by a burn barrel. I saw her defiantly raise her left, metal hand.

Dancers span down from their posts, each one whipping out a set of handcuffs. Each racer had that favorite hand cuffed to their wheel. Some drivers took the chance to grope the dancer chaining them. Furiosa elbowed her dancer away.

“Why are they all so hot to trot? What brings ten racers out to risk destruction from our Black Hills run – and from each other? Riches for the winning! They’ve been hungry, thirsty, aching for what I’ve got. A V6 engine and a passel of supporting tech including radiator and damper from our long-term sponsors, Gastown’s Refinery. If you got the know you’ll make it go. And there’s also our most desirable prize for the taking. You haven’t seen this before and you’ll never see it again. A one time exclusive offer presented to our racers today by me, the Outcrier! She’s sweet, a real treat, a concubine most fine, the Immortan himself had her, and our winner will, too…Lolly!” The woman stepped out and made a halfhearted flourish. She didn't need to do much more, nude save for boots and a few strategic, studded leather bands.

The Outcrier began stalking around and introducing racing contestants. After folding an arm against her chest, Lolly stayed in her patch of firelight, just like the engine and tech in another. There was more action beside me. Capable whipped back her brown hood and undid the white scarf covering her head. She shook out her hair.

Her guards took alarm. “What are you doing?”

“I want to cover her, give her something!” Capable reached around her neck and removed a second scarf, also white, intricately embroidered. “When a Wife was thrown out we’d give her fabric before she went. It was what we had. We never got to with Lolly. How close can we get?” She reached up around her knees. A white sarong emerged from under her coat.

The box had filled up: other Gastown watchers had oozed in front of us. “Oxy! Get us to the front!” Oxy broke from his dilated gazing at Capable’s revealed hair to batter his way through, and we followed.

Capable tied the three pieces of fabric together in a long stream, and paused. She began to roll them into a bundle to throw them.

From my shirt pocket, I took out the rock from earlier, the same stone as the Citadel. “Tie this in a corner and throw the rock. Its weight will take the fabric where you throw it.”

Her young hands did it as fast as thought. “Do you want Oxy to lift you? Lengthen your throw?”

“Yes, and let’s call her, get her attention.” Oxy lifted her as easily as if she was a pup, held her out where she pointed. The Old Boys warded her on each side. I tugged on the waistband of Oxy's khaki trousers to hold him in place. Together, the two of us shouted, “Lolly! Lolly! LOLLY!” The guards, then the crowd around us took up the cry. Capable’s throw was a thing of beauty, the fabric bundle unravelling into a white comet, the stone knot landing at Lolly’s feet. There was a cheer.

Lolly snatched it up with both hands. She flung the fabric around her – and was transformed. The pure white wraps took her from a thin, reeling concubine to someone who was remembered, who had a Sister.

Once the History Woman compared her Vault students to Greek goddesses. I saw that in the white wraps over dark leather, Lolly straightening before the howling mob. She poised her fragility, looked more knowing, more capable: worthy of our prayers. She was splendid. But still so vulnerable. Swaying amidst steel and flame, a goddess of war and its prize in one, bright as Eris’ golden apple, thrown forth to sow desire and chaos.

And the Outcrier laughed. He lifted a hand, pausing two thugs ready to seize the fabric off her. “You know what I promised all of you. AND I DELIVER!”

The crowd roared in recognition. I fell back in horror at what we had done. The Outcrier didn’t have to name it. Draped in white, illuminated by hope, inaccessible yet available: Lolly was the Wasteland’s dream of a Wife of the Immortan. The racers were howling and revving engines in hungry tribute. I glanced at Capable, her face gone pale, eyes hollow in the firelight. She saw it, too, and the importance of it. It was Capable's first time trying to fix something in this greater apocalypse, outside the Citadel, and having it turn against her. She'd truly forgive me now - not out of need, not out of habit or to honor Miss Giddy's memory, but because she _knew_.

On the ground, the starting line of napalm burst into flames.

“We’ll let her new owner take the wraps off. Citadel’s hot to have her back. You’re hot to see the crews burn the track. Let me hear you roar!”

The crowd howled.

“Let me hear you beg for more!”

The Wasteland screamed.

“START YOUR ENGINES!”

In the cries and the thunder of engines and the hammering drums, the spectacle and the terrible waste, I thought I picked out a woman’s moan. It might have been Capable. Or, through her, the new world in waiting of Sophia’s last words: its own hope split from its greatest defense, grieving before it had a chance to be.

_Who killed the world?_

It was me.

“LET THE GASTOWN RACE BEGIN!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Donk is mentioned in [the War Rig's biography - official canon](http://madmax.wikia.com/wiki/Tatra_T815_%22The_War_Rig%22) published as a comic book extra!
> 
>  _plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose_ = French for "the more things change, the more they stay the same."
> 
> The History Man's last glimpse of Miss Giddy is folded within another story in my 'verse, [A Wretched Life.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6350671)
> 
> Substantial FLLV takeoff here from _It’s hard to explain, in retrospect, what actually happened_ to _a high and beautiful wave_ \- riffing on one of the better known FLLV passages about the rise and death of San Francisco's counterculture.
> 
> The three-failures-and-you're-Wretched canon for Wives in the Vault is from the _Mad Max_ comic, issue #1.  
>  Another piece in my 'verse [The Afterwife](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4097674/chapters/9291208) describes the fabric-giving ritual/headcanon.


	6. The Race

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An epic Gastown Race, narrated by the Outcrier. Furiosa drives to try and win the race prize, a former Wife of the Immortan. If she loses, the other woman's fate is concubinage - or living death as a Buzzard sacrifice.

_Wordburger: In some circles, the Mint 400 is a far far better thing than the Superbowl, the Kentucky Derby, and the lower Oakland roller derby finals all rolled into one._

The race itself was a confusion of screaming engines, screaming crowds, and the stench of burning petroleum products. Gaslight and flame illuminated the lower track. The event was shaped and dominated by the voice of the Outcrier, shouting, crooning, and howling through his megaphone. His commentary went something like this…

* * *

Let’s go racing, Gastown style, boys! And girls! They’re off. They’re running. Ten competitors including Buzzards by special dispensation, bookies’ favorite Cutsnake, and late upset competitor the Bag of Nails, Imperator Furiosa from the Citadel, all tearing up the track together. A beautiful sight, V8s and killers united to go down in flames!

The slightest of errors can cost you or win you this race, it’s happening now. The Holden crew took the platform hoons for granted, and they’ve blown. They’ve exploded. Kaboom! The platform’s a laugh but their fighter’s all that and a bag of crickets. Good on ya, got our show going with a bang! Blood and guts, that’s what you like to see, isn’t it?

And they’re all over the hill onto the long track, we’ll see them again in about ten. Keep your eyes on the skies, sometimes you’ll see their flames from here if they hit one of the burn barrel barricades. Have yourself some Aqua-Pepsi, where hydration meets adventure, never know _what_ you’ll get.

For any race _virgins_ out there, there’s not a lot of rules once the flag’s gone! Drive fast, drive hard, keep to the track, one time on the long loop through our Black Hills and three times on the short. Get yourself and your fighter alive across the finish line to win for our liberal and creative value of ‘alive’. Our new noncompete clause with the Amnesty Thunderdome means both fighter and driver get to enjoy the winnings. Don’t be sad, pups, tonight’s a guaranteed bloodbath on the track.

Today’s race is brought to you by me, the Outcrier, and by our official sponsors. Aqua-Pepsi, the official sports drink of the Thunderdome.  Gastown’s Refinery, responsible for the guzzoline none of us can live without. And the Gastown Executive Board. Together we offer the biggest prize in Wasteland motor racing, accept no substitute from inferior events.

Love being up here with you down there looking up at me! Where you all from, tonight? Gastown? Aaaah, there’s my mates. Bullet Farm? Ain’t you bad boys, running out to see me. Wastelanders! Joe-damn, there’s a lot of you. Folks been on the move since the Triumverate went down! A message from our sponsors the Gastown Refinery: recruitment is ongoing, we don’t care where you’re from, half-life, quarter-life, if you understand when I say “literacy and mathematics” they wanna talk to you. If you understand when I say “blood and guts” they’re also recruiting for their top-end security team, your chance to work with the first and cruellest Polecat, the legendary Force.

Back to the track, racers coming down from the hill run. They’ve made it through the burn barrels and over the ravine jump. Did we set up a rockfall? Maybe!! Out of ten contenders five, now six, are down here for the final run, three screaming circuits and then our winner.

Crowd favorite the platform hoons are going into a spin on the corner accelerate. Watch out for the wall. Oops! Calling all scavs, this one’s for you. What a mess, fuel on the road, debris everywhere in the chase ready to cut down others’ tires. Now that the track’s all pretty we’re ready for the final round. Hold your breath more ‘n usual Gastown, it’s up for grabs now.

It’s our three lead contenders, Cutsnake Buzzards Furiosa, make that Cutsnake Furiosa Buzzards, make that Furiosa Cutsnake Buzzards, Furiosa by a bumper, in the final short track round. Three chrome drivers in one battle. It’s tight. It’s hot. Fighters have death in their eyes. Pedals to the floor, three cars door to door. They’re at the point of paint exchange, they’re engaged, they’re mates, see what’s happening here? Cutsnake and the Buzzards are tag teaming Citadel, they’re out for a spit roast. Two separate factions, Cutsnake and the Buzzards, very strong rivalry now that the Triumverate ain’t what it used to be. But they’re coming together to take down the Bag of Nails.

WHOA!!! Buzzards just grappled Citadel’s rear and put them in a spin and Cutsnake has actually turned back to lock bumpers. He’s sent his fighter over to take on Citadel – and the Buzzards have, too. Furiosa’s out of the car, the Bag of Nails cannot resist joining in the fight, she’s left her arm chained to the wheel. Bookies, this is a legal move. That arm has previously been judged to be part of Furiosa’s body, and a driver wants to tear their arm off that’s their business. The bloodbath you wanted, here on the track.

Ain’t they a team, warms my heart it does, seeing how Furiosa and the Citadel fighter work. One word and he’s taking on Cutsnake’s basher while Furiosa deals to the Buzzards. She’s fighting one handed. She’s screaming her face off. A gut-kick, a face smash - anyone jealous? Look at this Thunderdome style, she’s impaled him on the vehicle’s own spikes. And she’s not stopping! She’s taking on the driver! At the other end Cutsnake versus Citadel, white paint and red blood, lots of head butts, lots of snarling. I’d say kiss an’ make up, boys, but that ain’t no kiss.

Not sure what happened in that vehicle cab but Furiosa’s coming out with a weapon and a whole lot of blood. There’s that Citadel teamwork again, Citadel boy’s swung Cutsnake’s mate right around into Furiosa’s approach. A nice clean kill, throw him on the barbie. An epic battle here on the Gastown racetrack, one for history.

Cutsnake’s pulling out, no, he’s trying to, still tangled up in the Citadel’s front grille. What you call that, a snake catcher? Furiosa’s back at the wheel and she’s using the car. She is using the car, shaking him like a bitch with a rat. Now they’re apart. One more opportunity for the Bag of Nails to have a crack. Fight it all the way to the finish. Pure driving from here.

Speaking of which, guess what? This is a race! And while our top trio was having it out on the track someone else was taking the finish line. That’s right, contestant number…five?

Fukushima.

Contestant number five, leading when it mattered most, is the winner and champion! It’s an upset, it’s the underdog taking the prize while the top dogs fought among themselves, it’s a classic. Somebody made a killing with the bookies an’ I hope it was you, you right there in the front, full-life with your shirt off. Here, have a pass for the afterparty. Just the one ‘cause I guarantee you’ll be making friends there, hope you like spit roast.

THIS IS YOUR WINNER, GASTOWN! THIS IS THE VICTOR OF THE GASTOWN RACE! Driving a…the smeg these notes say…self-built 1800 cc tarp-aluminium-and-recycled-plastic ultralight. Looking a little _melted_ there, a little _scorched_ , but it did the job, got in quick around the back. His fighter’s a mercenary so the driver’ll be heading off into the Wasteland with the full takings, our engine and tech package and the ravishing concubine Lolly, look at that, ain’t she a good girl, goin’ right along. Watch your back, little lady, you’re on your own now! Here’s hoping you all get out of Gastown alive.

Refresh yourself with our sponsors Aqua-Pepsi. We’ll see the lucky ones at our exclusive afterparty. For everyone else, Gastown’s night markets are waiting. As a final word from our sponsors remember the motto of the Gastown Executive Board: _resistance is useless!_


	7. The Afterparty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At the races’ killer afterparty, Capable thinks she can save the situation and the lost Wife, Furiosa has it out with Gastown’s top bitch, and one of the race’s losers is out for blood. Someone’s going to die historic... 
> 
> Warnings: violence and character death!

_Wordburger: It was dangerous lunacy, but it was also the kind of thing a real connoisseur of edge-work could make an argument for._

* * *

 

Our Citadel quintet was unfashionably early to the Outcrier’s afterparty, held at his warehouse. After the race upset when none of the favorites, including Furiosa, won, the watchers had gone wild in a hundred ways. This made the afterparty the safest place to wait for our crew.

The Outcrier had thoughtfully parked a security guard in each of the new apertures Furiosa had bashed open with the Rig. The holes in the cinderblock let in red Gastown flamelight and the powdery illumination of the Outcrier’s salvaged neon. A band and some dancers were setting up. The mezzanine was heavy with speakers and sound equipment. The drug table had been shifted downstairs and replenished. If I had been twenty years younger, I’d have been plotting with Travis and Sophia to make the most of the party.

Not tonight. After the race, my party was definitely over.

I began: “Wordburger –“

Capable clenched her temples. “No, please. Stop with the wordburgers.”

“I was going to quote Miss Giddy herself. Something she said the day us History People arrived at the Citadel.”

She sighed. “All right. The last one.”

“That wasn’t what we expected _at all_.”

“No. No, it wasn’t. At least it’s not the Buzzards.”

“Or Cutsnake. Don’t underestimate him. He’s a spoiler, one to kick someone who’s down. And he spoke earlier of his ambitions.”

One of our Old Boys said, “Tough, he lost. That schlanger was disqualified because his fighter died.” Capable emerged from her shock to discuss the race with him and the other guard. I didn’t dare interrupt to clarify that Cutsnake had harboured wider ambitions, by the sound of it. Warlord-wide ones.

I turned to Oxy, who seemed less hallucinogenically stupefied than he had earlier. “Hullo? How’s it going? Water?” Oxy managed to shake his head. I hoped the slightly familiar surroundings would help.

The party was filling up. The guards on the door were strict. Entry was based on power, strength, or beauty. Some of the local warlords and human oddities from the territory south of Gastown were there. Others seemed to be Gastown’s merchants, technical experts, and elite fighters. Two guards and a concubine seemed to be the accessories of the moment. By these standards, Capable, with the Old Boys warding her and Oxy on his chain, appeared well equipped.

There was a ruffle around the main entrance as a particularly large contingent entered. Capable watched guards and officials surrounding a tall, veiled woman. “There’s half of Gastown’s rulers right there. Do you think the Jade would help us?”

I raised my eyebrows. “I had dinner with her once. Grand company, as you’d expect from the People Eater’s longest-tenured mistress. But a terrible person, in all senses of the word. If she says yes, expect there to be a reckoning later.” The Jade was swathed in concealing veils from head to foot, save for her eyes. It was said that nobody had seen her face for six oldyears, after the People Eater had handed her over to the Immortan’s mad younger son, Scabrous Scrotus. Scabrous and the People Eater were both blessedly dead. The Jade was Gastown’s nexus of power, today.

Capable weighed what I said and what she knew. “It’s still worth a try.”

“History!” The Jade swept me under one black-draped arm. It was hard to tell, but she seemed thinner than before. Her beringed hand on my shoulder had a tremor. Leprosy and syphilis could take twenty years, once they had a hold – and she’d had that long with the People Eater. “Such a spectacle, I haven’t enjoyed myself so much in ages. Look at these new boys I’ve acquired. Aren’t they splendid?” She gestured to two of her attendants, dark, handsome twins, heads bowed. I peered at the rest of her entourage. A spiked mask I recognized from earlier was there: Silence.

“Most dramatic. Have you met one of our Citadel leaders, Capable? She and the Knowing are Sisters.”

The Jade surveyed Capable frankly. “ _The_ Capable,” said the Jade. The entourage turned. The Jade had just given Capable an honorific, and it was going to stick. She gestured at Oxy’s chain in Capable’s hand. “Power becomes you.”

Capable forced a smile and asked if, perhaps, the Jade might intervene on behalf of Lolly’s freedom. “She was a Wife of the Immortan once, like we both were,” she managed. “A human being. She deserves better than this.”

The Jade contemplated. “It’s true. You and I, we were both Wives of the Immortan.”

“Yes!” Capable lit up with hope.

“Look at what the two of us have done. I, establishing myself in Gastown. You and your Sisters seizing the Citadel for yourselves. You even did it from inside the Vault! So impressive. In this world, we deserve what we earn. Or take. Why should we help someone who couldn’t help herself? Don’t burden yourself with the weak.”

Capable went white with rage, which the Jade blithely ignored. “Convenient that you’re here. I’ve got a little announcement soon – something that’s been vexing us since the Amnesty was wrapped up. Since the Citadel’s come out for the Race, I’m sure you’ll be pleased about it.” She snapped her fingers. “Upstairs, boys.” The entourage progressed to the Outcrier’s mezzanine. While we’d been talking, the Outcrier himself had gone up there, inseparable from ‘Lectricity Boy.

Most of the race survivors trooped in, to cheers and jeers. Cutsnake was notable for his absence. I smirked: he was the sort to be a poor loser. Furiosa strode in, last and alone, her mechanical arm _in situ_ , weighted with a scoped rifle. On purpose, most likely, to show she could get away with it in Gastown. She ignored her audience. Capable handed me Oxy’s chain and dashed to meet her. “Are all the Boys alive?”

“Seeing what they can salvage,” said Furiosa. “We get the Buzzards’ car. That’s something.”

Feedback whined from the forty-six-year-old speakers. We all winced and turned upwards. For a few minutes, the Outcrier did his best to interview the winner. A lanky figure in wraps and goggles, the winner wasn’t half as talkative or as bloodthirsty as the Outcrier would have liked. For half a moment, I had the wild idea that it might be Max in disguise.

The man spoke in a wry tenor. “Welp, I thought, it’s a race, I’ll just make it go fast, you know?” My old spine collapsed a little more. It wasn’t Max.

The Outcrier tried, “Tell us about your fighter! Any story there?”

“Uh…she was skinny and wouldn’t add more mass than necessary to the vehicle?” A spotlight picked out his fighting mercenary, a wiry black-haired woman getting loaded at the drug table. She gave the Outcrier the finger.

The Outcrier ignored her to force his face into a smile and bark a laugh, and the crowd followed his cue. “He’s got a fast car, a faster V6, and a fast chassis to put it in, if you know what I mean.” 

The Jade emerged from the Outcrier’s shadow. The Outcrier handed her the microphone. Gastown’s leading ruler declared, “I speak on behalf of the Gastown Executive Board, your very pleased Race sponsor. It is fitting on such an enjoyable and profitable evening for us to declare that the Outcrier is the new Voice of Gastown.” The crowd murmured.

The Outcrier snatched the microphone back. “Means you get to hear me at the Murderdome AND the Thunderdome!”

The Citadel group exchanged horrified looks. “Being some glorified emcee is bad enough. The Voice is more than that, isn’t it?” I asked.

Capable said, “It’s a legal position, on their Board. The Voice does negotiation, diplomacy, decides who’s won the Thunderdome. The Citadel’s going to have to work with him. After today! Can you talk to him? The same way you can deal with the Jade?”

I looked cautiously at the silent Furiosa and said, “He’s exactly half my age. You’re stuck with him a lot longer than you are with me. Or, at this rate, the Jade. I doubt she’s a well woman, under her veils.”

We watched as the Outcrier descended to do the rounds, glad-handing with his right hand, his left arm around the now-languid ‘Lectricity, the pair of them the toast of Gastown. The Jade went down after, veils swirling around her like an oil spill, an abdicated body surrounded by a phalanax of young flesh.

The lanky race winner came last, with the shell-shocked Lolly beside him, huddling inside her white fabric. The band started up with an electronic grind. I felt I could have liked the winner, with his different vision and his subtle undermining of the Outcrier, if it wasn’t for him accepting all of the prizes. Including Lolly.

Capable seemed to have gone through the same line of thought. “How can a good person enter a race where there’s a person as a prize?”

“It’s a hard Wasteland out there, with a lot of bad luck. I met men who’d gone mad from loneliness. He doesn’t look like a hard case, that one.”

Capable turned. “Furiosa. He’s a blackthumb. Can we offer him a place at the Citadel in exchange for Lolly’s freedom? The workshop where we found the race car?” She was kind enough to explain, “It was all locked down, gathering dust.”

Furiosa said, “And if he won’t give her up?” Unconsciously, she lifted her rifle.

Capable frowned. “I can ask, at least. Let me go alone.”

“Alone with guards.”

Furiosa and I watched them cross the venue, the Boys a few respectful steps behind Capable.

Furiosa spoke, almost to herself. “I knew she could be better than I was.” Her pause was weighted with meaning: here it was, happening. She turned to me. “Is there anything to drink here that isn’t poisoned?”

I proffered the gin. “This hasn’t killed me yet. It’s probably a touch radioactive.”

Furiosa winced in anticipation before downing a fast swig. When she lowered the bottle, her eyes had gone bright. “It tastes like plants. Like something green.” After staring at the barely-legible label, she went back for another, slower round.

“That’s got a kick.” Furiosa looked up at exactly the wrong moment. She saw the Jade, laughing. “My turn. If Capable can do it…hold this.” Furiosa was talking to Oxy, not me, handing the fighter she trusted her rifle. “I won’t get close if I’m too armed.” She strode off towards the Jade, still holding the gin. I grimaced. In our past dealings, Furiosa had barely been able to spend five minutes with the Jade without wanting to kill the other woman. I waited five paces and followed, urging Oxy with me. She should have that rifle to hand.

Furiosa had stalked over to the Jade, shouldering through her young guards as if they weren’t there. “It’s time we had it out. I never liked you. Now you pull this with the Outcrier.”

The Jade stared her down haughtily. “I never liked you either, Imperator. And I had reasons. You were a favourite of Scabrous Scrotus. I will say, when Scabrous put me to his torture, he knew what he was doing.”

Furiosa spat, “I hated Scabrous.”

“Did you? Did you really? Expedient of you to say it now.”

“I Joe-damn despised him. It makes me sick every time his name is linked with mine. He was a sadist, a rapist, a madman.”

The music cranked louder, and I lost their words. The Jade’s stance was bitter, but she was listening. Silence was on one knee beside her, in false submission, a rebar nightstick at the ready. What would he earn for kneecapping Furiosa? I thought of Max and his limp. But something had gone right. The Jade made a tiny hand gesture. Silence slipped up to standing, behind her.

Something else seemed to be going right. Across the room, Capable was still talking with the race winner. Lolly had wrapped the white fabric around her head and upper body now, a poignant echo of Capable’s own style. The nearby neon made their group hopefully luminous.

I turned to Oxy to see if he’d be any help to either of them. He was watching a scene beneath the mezzanine that drew most of the eyes at the party. One of the mezzanine supports carried a male pole dancer, patterned with soft tattoos, clinging and spinning like a gecko. A louring hammerhead of a man guarded the base of his pole. The dancer's lithe reptilian moves were bringing Oxy back to earth. Oxy asked, “Can I have some of that water?”

“Of course!” I dug it out of my waistband for him. He drank half of it, then offered me the other half. It was the best of Wasteland manners and the sanest thing he’d done in hours. “Finish it. You probably need it. Are you feeling better?”

Oxy downed the last of the water. “I am. My mind feels…clean. Purified.” He smiled in an unfocused way and crushed the frail old plastic bottle in one fist. “I know what to do, now. My duty is clear. It’s time.” Oxy handed me Furiosa’s rifle. Gently, but using his strength, he took the end of the chain from me, and walked away. I went to follow, to help, then stopped. I’d helped him weeks ago, when I sharpened his tattoos. The crowd flinched at him, parted for him and hesitated to close around him. The night was his, whatever he was doing. He hadn’t mentioned the Great Goanna Spirit once.

We were all back where we’d started. Slick blusterers winning power. Road warriors following their destinies. The strong women of the Wasteland putting things to rights, or trying to. And me: the last of History: a complication, unnecessary. I turned away to let it all happen.

A jolt went through me. I was, suddenly, homesick for my family’s Outback station. The dreadful sound system had been reminding me of my father’s old 70s stereo since we came in. But it had been something else. I scanned the crowd to try and find the trigger. There – a silhouette against one of the new entrances, marked by the profile of an old Outback hat. An Akubra.

Cutsnake was fashionably late.

I saw his powerful shoulders twisting like his namesake, metal gleaming in his hand. He was trusting in the safety of the Wasteland’s elite to be torn between targets. I saw how he turned. Would he take on Furiosa for vengeance, or Capable and Lolly for lust? Either attack, with Gastown and the Citadel on tonight’s bleeding edge, would start a war. And a war between these fragile bastions would damage civilisation beyond redemption.

All I had was –

A rifle from Furiosa. Exactly what the History Woman had in the Vault. And history had shown what she would do.

I whipped the rifle to my old shoulder, expendable since the apocalypse began. I snapped the safety, sighted the Akubra, above most of the crowd _._ “To you and your girls, Soph. Happy race day.”

I fired.

Time slowed like syrup. I counted as five shots emptied the magazine. There was a flash of red, or dark. Cutsnake’s shadow staggered. Bullets _exploded._ This wasn’t a standard round, but some creative hell ammo. Wasn’t it always worse than we expected? Don’t we always find a way? They made the rifle’s recoil a brutal punch to my left shoulder –

throwing me back –

back and down-

my chest –

my _heart_ –

a world of pain –

the pain of the world –

flashing, black and white, pure atomic _white_  –

.

.

.

Something chemical blasted my nose, blew open my heart. All the colours flashed before my eyes. I found myself on my knees. A pale hand before me unclenched around a sparkle, a shattered ampoule of amyl nitrate. I looked up into a silent spiked mask, concealing a contaminated history. Laughter rocked me at the irony of it all. Of course the People Eater’s former slave would know how to pull an old man out of a heart attack. And he wanted me alive, for the sake of our deal, to get his own life back.

That didn’t stop Silence from dragging me up by the scruff of my neck. I was probably the only person in Gastown he could manhandle. My worn-thin aloha shirt tore as he hauled me five paces, thrusting me before a stern trio: the Jade, Furiosa, and the Outcrier.

The Outcrier found his tongue first. “The smeg is going on? I’m having a party, here.”

I was still grinning. “Your loser was deciding between two human targets. He took too long, and became one himself. _Wordburger: my risk, my gun!_ ”

“Check him for the Gastown brand,” said the Jade. One of the Jade’s matched pair turned over Cutsnake’s corpse and hauled him over. Cutsnake’s head (and the world’s last Akubra) was pulped, but his neck was whole, as was his healed Gastown brand.

Capable had the presence of mind to dash over and seize Furiosa’s rifle from me. Our circle of watchers stepped back, leaving the leaders and their entourage at the core. Capable turned to the Jade, “You want us to help ourselves? He’s done it. How Gastown is that?”

The Jade raised a bejewelled finger. “Ah, but he was defending two other people. Not _himself_ – which makes him culpable for murder under Gastown law. However. This is the Outcrier’s property. In this place, it’s up to him.”

Capable’s face froze silent around an incredulous protest, held back at the last minute. Furiosa’s nostrils flared. Tight with rage, harrowed with fear, or sharp with glee, everyone turned to the Outcrier. The last of the amyl nitrate wore off abruptly. I felt cold, and very, very tired.

He basked in the moment.  “I’m having a good day. Tell you what, old fella. Curse all Before-time again and I’ll let you off.”

This crowning absurdity fired me back up. “Jam it up your arse, you bloody pie-faced fuckwit _wanker_.”

“Aaaah, that takes me back.” The Outcrier brightened further. “Hey, if you shot him, does that mean he…died historic?” He clamped my ringing shoulder and gave me a shake. “Get it?”

I winced with new agony. “Bugger off, you fucking cunt.”

“Right in the old nostalgia. Later!” The Outcrier and his mate sauntered away to glad-hand the crowd edging closer. He was a bloody coward, too. He’d left as Furiosa approached.

After nudging the lobotomized corpse with her foot, she glared at me. “I thought History People couldn’t shoot.”

I suppressed a wordburger. _History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce._ “It’s a story.”

“He can tell us later.” Capable handed Furiosa the rifle. “We’ve got to sort some Citadel mark for him when we get back. Not a brand, something. We can use it for other Citadel people, too.” Capable had spoken. I was going back to the Citadel. Furiosa realized this, too. She took a double pull of gin.

After she lowered the bottle, she asked, “What’s happening now?”

Capable gestured at the race winner and Lolly. “We’re pretty close to a deal.”

Lolly mustered her courage and placed a trembling hand on the race winner’s arm. “I didn’t like the Citadel but I want to see my sister again and you’re a blackthumb and there’s always been breeders at the Citadel, the blackthumbs used to get to choose, didn’t they?”

The Imperator clicked open her rifle and began to reload. Her cool eyes stared down the race winner. “It’s their choice, now, what they do. Yours, too. Maybe this driver feels like another race, when he tries to leave?”

The race winner hastily said, “Definitely her choice.”

Furiosa favoured him with a nod. “Blackthumb?” She held out the gin.                             

Capable wrapped Lolly in one arm and leaned over to me. We shouted over the music about gun recoil, possible heart attacks and broken bones. After poking at me while I winced, she took one of the scarves back from Lolly. “I’m going to put your arm in a sling. And I have painkillers here. None of the toxic Gastown stuff, wholesome Vuvalini herbs. Are you in lots of pain?” She opened up her duster coat and rummaged in some internal pockets.

I knew what plants had been revived from the Keeper of the Seeds’ stash. I said, “Yes. Lots of pain!”

“The call of the Great Goanna Spirit could not be denied!” Oxidative Damage had returned. He was spattered with blood, the length of his chain dark and oozing. It didn’t seem to be his blood, by his beaming smile and his easy stance. He hadn’t returned alone. The tawny goanna from the Gastown market was curling around his neck, clinging to him for warmth.

Another tap on my sore shoulder made me snarl. “Everybody _stop touching me!_ ” I turned.

A greasy Gastown character in goggles wanted my attention. He was thumbing back at Cutsnake’s corpse. “’Scuse me. You gonna eat that?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wordburgers:
> 
>  _History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce_ – Karl Marx
> 
> Thanks to all_doofed_out on Tumblr for letting me borrow the OCs Gecko (the pole dancer) and Hammerhead (his guard).


	8. The Cop

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the Citadel group, driving under the influence through the Wasteland, getting stopped by a cop is the best thing that could happen.

_Wordburger: Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a highway traffic cop._

* * *

A bump in the road woke me up. I was in the back seat of the latest Rig, swaying through the Wasteland. My left arm was in a sling improvised from one of Capable’s scarves. I creaked upright. Something was clinging to my face. I pawed in front of me and discovered a very ugly yellow respirator mask. They should have saved it for somebody younger. Dragging it away, I sat up. A War Boy outrider clung outside my window. Beyond him, dawn was lighting the horizon with rose and citron, blending into the indigo above. What were we going to call these colors in a few generations, in this world without flowers?

Voices were talking quietly in the front seat. In the back with me, Oxy was feeding his goanna a cricket. The willowy young woman, Lolly, sat between us, delicately self-contained.

I held out the mask. “Do you want this?”

Lolly shook her head. “We’re away from Gastown,” she said. “I can breathe.” She smiled, to prove it, and didn’t stop.

I set the mask on the seat between us and racked my brains. My last clear memory was of Capable, diagnosing me with a broken collarbone, tying my arm in the sling and dosing me with herbal painkiller. After that?

The chronology of the previous night splintered completely. The Vuvalini’s painkiller on top of the residual amyl nitrate had stopped my cerebellum cortex as well as my pain. I had an idea that the party had kicked into high gear, spun over some edge by my legalized, amusing-for-Gastown murder of Cutsnake. There might have been an extended, elaborate toast to _the History Woman, Miss Giddy, my dear longtime friend and tribeswoman Sophia, let us all salute her beauty, intelligence, and wordburger: badassery_ , while drinking with some…geologists? That had to be pure wishful thinking, a blur of Before-time and now.

My shirt, ready to be broken down into Wretched rags, had a strange rustle in one pocket. _Wordburger:  Memories of this night are extremely hazy. All I have, for guide-pegs, is…_

A pocketful of vellum scraps and other small flat things, all covered with scribbled notes. I read.

Evidently I’d fallen in with some of Gastown’s Refinery drillers, out on a race night spree. The notes in my pocket were a mess of wordburgers and calculations towards some project. A water drilling project. I tucked the notes back in my shirt without saying anything. The idea they contained was audacious. Absurd. And it might work. Getting Corpus to have the final say on it might get him and I on speaking terms again. Like the best of us, he could never resist having an opinion.

The Rig wavered on the road. I snapped further alert, if not entirely in the present, about to say that Furiosa had likely had too much gin to drive. Then I recalled more, and subsided. After the ghastly situation I’d dumped Furiosa in, she deserved a few drinks. A lot of drinks. Medicinal alcohol for the brain. Furiosa was talking, really talking, to Capable up front. I couldn’t hear the soft spill of her words. They weren’t for me. Capable, though drawn and tired, radiated relief. My intuition said that Furiosa would be there in spirit, as well as body, for Capable’s next Tell.

We had a roller-coaster moment when we hit the bad part of the dilapidated Gastown road. The Citadel and Gastown never had agreed on who should spend a week in the baking, dangerous heart of the Last Road to fix it. Lolly quivered and clutched herself. For her sake, I missed seat belts. Furiosa laughed. “Ha. Let’s miss this part.” Almost playfully, she took the Rig off road, driving alongside the fragmenting asphalt. When she accelerated, fans of sand sprayed up into the rising dawn. She was enjoying carving out her own road, for once, having a whole bare Wasteland to claim. It wasn’t like anyone was going to pull us over. The end of the world was good for that, at least.

Our outriders had obediently, perhaps stupidly, followed Furiosa off road. The battered ultralight was well ahead. I glimpsed that Treads had the two Gastown mates in the battered rustbucket. There was a grind of gears: Bogan was wrestling along the Hilux formerly known as Cutsnake’s. Another lucid memory returned, that of looting Cutsnake’s dead pockets and finding the keys.  What else had I claimed?

Had I eaten _that_?

If I had, he didn’t deserve it.

I was probing my teeth with my tongue (just checking, you know) when Oxy sat up, suddenly alert. “Incoming!” The War Boy guards caught his alarm and raised weapons. A sharper sound, a faster hum, was cutting through our engines’ rumble and the dry rain of sand. A War Boy bashed Furiosa’s window. “Sole vehicle. Fast and low.”

“Keep offroad. See if he passes.” Furiosa pulled her horn once, a signal to go on.

The sound summoned the lonely car. It screamed past the Rig, past everyone but the ultralight, and curved around, somehow finding a perfect spot to block both our onroad and offroad passage. The sky above it was lightening into more pre-Anthropocene colors, peach, acacia-yellow and forget-me-not blue.

Furiosa had to brake hard. The entire Rig shuddered and slewed sideways to a stop, in a shower of sand. Our lighter vehicles spun in the loose ground, their drivers less skilled than the lone car’s master. Furiosa seized her rifle. “Down,” she said. Lolly was the only one who ducked. The rest of us were looking forwards.

Furiosa began to put it into words. “I remember…”

The car’s driver was emerging, in classic Wasteland style, one hand up, so tanned and dirty he looked positively Wretched. His head poked out, a banksia-man bristle of beard and wind-snarled hair. He finished emerging from the car, a pauldron on his right shoulder. His left arm cradled a burden, tightly, like it was precious; his left leg dragged under everything he carried.

“Stand down,” Furiosa shouted. “MAX!”

We’d been pulled over by the last cop in the Wasteland, Max Rockatansky.

Unsure that he’d been recognized, Max was holding up his burden. It was a large rectangle in his one hand, a plant press. The press was ragged with dry botanical matter and protruding branches. Like the decent settlement cop he’d been, long ago and far away, he’d followed instructions. _Put leaves and flowers you find inside the press,_ the Dag and Toast had told him. They hadn’t said _take the leaves and flowers off their stems first._ So he hadn’t, simply cramming everything in that he could.

Max had succeeded in his scouting. Somewhere out there, there was still a scrap of the world that had survived humanity. A Green Place. Like the best Before-time police, he hadn't left the trail until he'd completed his mission. _Wordburger: I do solemnly sincerely and truly declare and affirm that I will well and truly serve our soverign lady..._ Even if it had taken twice as long and, based on his battered vehicle and self, taken a toll. What had happened to him, out there? Another story was hovering around him. Something out there had done him some good. This wasn't the shattered man who had taken me up the Citadel treadmill the day of the revolution.

Max’s bundle of life had a gravitational pull for Furiosa. Radiant with the desert face, she jerked her door open and fell out, sprinting over to Max, the gin bottle in her hand. They connected just as the sun came over the horizon, blinding me.

I was still blinking when I heard Oxy’s door open. “In the name of the Great Goanna Spirit!” he roared. He, too, pounded off into the desert sand and pebbles, to flat rippled ground away from the road.

“Help me watch him, Lolly?” I said. “Your eyes are younger than mine.”

The young woman gave a timid start. It may have been the first time anyone deferred to her, asked for her help, in years. “He’s running out into the desert and he’s taking the lizard off his neck. He’s holding it up to the sky? Now he’s putting the lizard down.”

We both peered out the open door. Oxidative Damage’s enthusiastic call rang to the dawn. “Be free, o child of the Great Goanna Spirit! I have brought you home. Be free!”

“Is the lizard making a run for it?”

“No!” Lolly said. “It’s going in a circle and it’s…it’s going back to him!”

I could just barely discern movement in the sand. The lizard had surveyed the Wasteland and decided it preferred its large, warm provider of treats.

Lolly reported, “It’s gone up inside his trouser leg.” Even I could see Oxy contorting against the desert dawn, trying to extract the lizard from his clothes without offending the Great Goanna Spirit.

Meanwhile, Furiosa was leading Max in. They had exchanged treasures. She had the plant press cupped in her mechanical arm, lightly touching the leaves and branches with her living hand. Max was taking an experimental sip from the gin bottle.

Lolly asked, “Is it always this strange, now?”

“It’s been this strange for years. Forty-six oldyears. Sixteen thousand, seven hundred and seventeen days. _Wordburger:_ _We are all wired into a survival trip now!”_

Lolly blinked. Capable sighed. The exasperated, sane, amused sound of it, Miss Giddy to the life, gave me a shot of grief again. But it wasn’t a killing shot, any more.

Capable looked around at the lot of us. “You’ll get used to it.” She called out her window. “Let’s keep moving.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All wordburgers from _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_ by Hunter S. Thompson. Except for _I do solemnly sincerely and truly declare and affirm that I will well and truly serve our soverign lady_ which is from the official Australian police Oath of Office.
> 
> What happened to Max in the Wasteland in the months between Max's discovery of some leftover nature in [Very Max, Much Wasteland, Such Dog](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5342645) and his return here? I don't know! George Miller, you tell me!
> 
> THANK YOU FOR READING! For your time and your kudos and your comments on this take on the Wasteland from a very different POV.

**Author's Note:**

> I'll be riffing on Hunter S. Thompson's _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_ (FLLV) throughout this story, noting both direct quotes and sections inspired by FLLV. No plagiarism intended, but literary play. The plot of FLLV - run away to Las Vegas, abuse substances, and go see a race - was a magnificient match with the Max Max video game's premise of a Gastown Race. And the game canon of the Gastown Race itself was just waiting to clash with a post-Fury Road Citadel. So start your engines, today we're going...back to Gastown.
> 
> FLLV = Adapted quote from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson.
> 
>  _We can’t stop here_ – FLLV, “We can’t stop here…this is bat country!”  
>  _Good enough for government work_ – An aphorism common amongst government workers of all stripes, particularly geologists.  
>  _He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself_ – Frederich Neitzche.  
>  _The History Woman's own journal_ \- Another story of mine, [Weave a Circle](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4229832), has the journal in full.  
>  _The only bedrock rule is don’t burn the locals_ \- FLLV  
>  _A modest proposal_ \- Jonathan Swift's satirical essay, [A Modest Proposal: For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being A Burden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public](http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html), published in 1729: proposed cannibalism as a solution to child poverty.  
>  _The deserving poor_ – A concept popular in Victorian England: those who were poor through no fault of their own.  
>  _When I'd irritated Max...last time in Gastown..._ \- A tense discussion in the Gastown marketplace, in [Gastown Nights, Chapter 6.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4515567/chapters/10571313)  
>  _Know your dope fiend! Your life may depend on it!_ \- FLLV


End file.
